* Stuart Cheshire wrote:
In the MHonArc mail archive there are often super-long lines, which
would be wrapped to the window width when viewing in most mail
clients, but when viewed in a web browser they appear as long single
lines which take a lot of left-to-right scrolling to read them.
That is the result of some clients and users violating netiquette and
mail standards, for instance, RFC 1855, section 2.1.1:
- Limit line length to fewer than 65 characters and end a line
with a carriage return.
and RFC 2822 (and similarily RFC 5322), section 2.1.1:
There are two limits that this standard places on the number of
characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than
998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding
the CRLF.
And this does not cause problems just with unwrapped lines, it also has
other effects, like people quoting excessively long lines on one line
but then write their own text properly wrapped (that's appropriate be-
havior if long lines are rare and most likely intentional, such as when
including some computer code you don't want wrapped at odd positions.)
I note that one of the main culprits here are Apple Mail users, although
you seem to be using it yet have managed to send properly wrapped lines.
If there is something Apple Mail users can do to stop their netiquette
and standards violations, I would apprciate any pointer you may have.
Obviously the solution is to have those using broken or misconfigured
clients use clients that are not broken or configure them correctly.
As for the list archives, you can make the lines wrap by changing the
style sheet (or use an appropriate user style sheet), for instance,
pre { white-space: pre-wrap; }
should probably do it in modern clients (for older clients there is
option to use proprietary extensions in some browsers, but that may
not be necessary these days.) This would seem preferable over forcing
line wraps in the archival software as that would break lines that are
meant to be long for very good reasons.
--
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern(_at_)hoehrmann(_dot_)de ·
http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf