At 11:43 AM -0700 8/19/98, Laurence Lundblade wrote:
At 3:32 PM +0100 8/14/98, Ian Bell wrote:
There are actually two sorts of lines that are not terminated by "soft"
line endings: those that form the last lines of paragraphs and those
that are not intended to be wrapped at all. The distinction is vital but
this draft seems to confuse the two.
I think in practice we rarely care about this. Simple edit controls don't
allow you to tell the difference between these two cases. You could use a
heuristic that counts spaces and decide it's a table if there's multiple
occurances of multiple spaces, but if you care that much you probably ought
to use HTML.
The receiver can tell a run of fixed lines from a paragraph. It's
harder for the sender to know what to generate. In addition to
Laurence's suggestion, the font could be important (fixed-width fonts
are sent as fixed lines). Or, if user agents had the ability to select
word-wrap on sections, instead of an entire message, that could be used.
However the solution is to generate different MIME parts for flowed and
non-flowed text. I'm not sure how often this will be done in practice, but
I feel this is a completely viable option.
I would suggest that the draft say that all line breaks are ends-of-flows
or ends-of-paragraphs and all text is candidate for wrapping. If you want
no wrapping (when possible) you should put it in a different MIME entity.
That's an interesting idea. It gets rid of the trailing space issue,
but does make the message slightly harder to read in a non-MIME mailer.