On Sun, 31 Jul 2005, Ligesh wrote:
On Sun, Jul 31, 2005 at 02:32:24PM +0200, Dallman Ross wrote:
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/procmail/2005-07/msg00245.html
Do you think that looks all so readable?
Of course, badly written softwares will screw up; but that can't be helped.
As a matter of fact, I have a 'set wrapmargin=40' in my muttrc, which will
soft wrap the lines at around 80 chars itself. The comfortable reading length
is actually 65 chars, but I can't have such a setting because a lot of people
arbitrarily put hard newlines at 75 chars. :-)
Anyway, the point is:
- A single line paragraph will work in all circumstances. (You can configure
your display software to wrap the line at whatever you wish. And it will work
very fine in PDAs, and also will look good in forums.
- 75 char word wrap will screw up entirely in a lot of situations.
To me it trivially makes a formidable case for the former. Couple
this with the ease of editing at the sender end, I don't understand
why people still get into some religious fervor about the word
wrapping issue. 80 char is simply a historical relic from the days of
the dumb terminals. It is not only difficult to edit at the sender
end, it will screw up the display unless the screen width is more than
75 chars.
My mail software (pine) is configured to auto-wrap at 72 chars (74 is
the default, but I tend to get quoted a lot, and all the indentations
make it grow past the 80-col limit a bit too quickly. The nice thing,
though, is that now there's this thing called "flowed" text. You put an
extra space at the end of each line, and the other end's reader is
supposed to understand that it is a continuation of the same paragraph,
and therefore resize it to fit their column-width. The big problem with
it is that I often want specific formatting in my text, so I have to
disable it for about half my mails.
Your text was NOT flowed, hence when I reply it will probably still
quote you as a single long line (my MUA wrapped it for me). Just as a
test, I've flowed your last paragraph.
It should be interesting to see how *this* message shows up in the
archives. If people complain about it, then they need to read RFC 2646
(and then RFC 3676).
Damian Menscher
--
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