Warning: this message was generated by Apple Mail. I just can't stop my
insatiable appetite for shiny things. :-( [1]
On 16 Oct 2012, at 03:46, Randall Gellens
<randy(_at_)qti(_dot_)qualcomm(_dot_)com> wrote:
At 9:12 AM -0400 9/5/12, Michael Richardson {quigon} wrote:
Maybe I'm also concerned because many in the former "elite" have moved to
Apple Mail, and it seems that it is bug
compatible with Outlook in it's assumption that format=flowed is the
default, an act which destroys email quoting, and therefore discussion.
I just noticed this assertion, which is quite false. Format=flowed protects
and preserved quoting. It's the only way to avoid ludicrous and impossible
to read quoting (which happens after quoted passages get line-wrapped at odd
points). Also, as far as I know, Exchange does not support format=flowed at
all. My understanding is that it insists on HTML quoting, which is entirely
different.
You're right that this is the virtue of F/F, but that's not what Michael said.
Perhaps it was the context of the quoting, but the discussion refers to the
fact that both LookOut and Apple Mail have (as you can see, by looking at this
message) a nasty habit of *assuming* an F/F semantic by default. In other
words, they generate hugely long long long long long long long long long lines
that only another equally broken client can interpret correctly, but
dynamically reflowing those lines, by applying consistent quoting indicators to
the lines of such reflowed lines, and so forth. That, I believe, is a
legitimate complaint, because it effectively creates an island between those
who have support for Format/Flowed and those who do not. At least Apple has
the decency to use quoted-printable encoding to protect the actual transmitted
lines, but it means nothing if competent MIME readers reconstitute the
corruption at the other end, by reassembling long lines, and then failing to!
reflow them. And it's worse yet if a news reader without MIME tries to quote
the lines, complete with Q-P line terminators. Or if a reply comes from
somebody whose editor wraps the lines, but using soft line breaks which are
never generated externally, resulting in whole paragraphs being quoted using a
single quoting indicator. And so on, and so on, and so on …
I filed bug 7989556 (Mail uses quoted-printable indiscriminately) with Apple on
16 May 2010. It was marked as duplicate of 7547565 on 25 May 2010. The system
is closed; you can only see your own bug reports. I therefore have no idea
what's going on with that. Meantime, I apologise for the inconvenience. No,
really. :-(
Cheers,
Sabahattin
[1] This isn't strictly true. I'm blind, and Apple are the only guys who have
stepped up to accessibility in anything approaching a serious manner, by
including the screen reader in the OS and ensuring accessibility across their
applications. For better or worse, they're the only choice for a smartphone,
and the only choice for a Windows convert (notwithstanding textmode Linux, of
course, which I still enjoy in VMs for braille support). I'm objective, so
this could change, but on both Windows and Mac OS the only really accessible
choices are the built-in MUAs (I used to use Pegasus Mail under Windows, when I
had the screen reader support for it, although I now understand that
Thunderbird has taken its place).