If there is no way to tag a line as "don't wrap this", replies to
standard text/plain messages MUST NOT be promoted to format=flowed
Promotion to format=flowed should be done with care, and probably only
under user direction, as I see it. It's the safest course.
Users won't be aware of the problems of promoting to format-flowed -
they will probably always do it so that their own text will look pretty.
The result will be that quoted text will get miss-attributed whenever
any non-standard quote character has been used.
This is but one of many potential problems. FWIW, the one that bothers me the
most is that preformatted material such as tables can get damaged.
Specifically, a user may see something that looks OK when they display it due
to their choice of widths. But when they resend it labelled as flowed it
subsequently gets ruined.
However, I fail to see what this has to do with the present proposal. Yes, if
you do promotion to flowed text willy-nilly you can have trouble. But this is
already happening -- lots of deployed agents do this sort of promotion
routinely, and it isn't going to stop no matter what the standards say.
The most we can hope for is that agents will adopt a proposal that to some
extent legitimizes what they are doing. And it would help enormously to have a
means of labelling flowed text for what it is. And frankly, I no longer
particularly care what form the labelling takes -- the longer we continue to
debate this in our quest for the optimal format and label, the harder it is
going to be to get something deployed. In fact it may already be too late.
The thing I don't like about this proposal is that it asks for a change of
behavior in text generation. Having a way to label flowed text for what it is
seems reasonable and it seems like something agents could adopt fairly readily.
But placing more elaborate requirements on what they generate and how they
interpret what they receive seems risky to me -- will agents actually do this,
or have we raised the bar too high?
Now, I'm willing to be told by the MUA folks that this proposal, if adopted,
will get them to change their ways. But I'd really like to hear this stated
directly.
Ned