[PLUG] 80 characters

Aaron Burt aaron at speakeasy.org
Thu Nov 6 11:21:02 UTC 2003


On Wed, 5 Nov 2003, Carla Schroder wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 November 2003 1:57 pm, Felix Lee wrote:
> > Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com>:
> > > OK, I've been staying out of this, but it's all your fault I cannot
> > > resist. Why is this even an issue? Both my newsreader and mail clients
> > > auto-wrap just fine.
> >
> > because nobody can agree on when line breaks are meaningful and
> > when they're not, and there's no simple way of marking the
> > difference between meaningful and meaningless line breaks.
>
> Ok, fine, but my mail reader does not have this problem. Every time someone
> gripes about "your line breaks are too long" I see it as a problem with their
> mail reader. Because mine wraps text just fine.

Hrm.  The problem is that when a person has their line breaks set at 80 or
a little
over, most readers wrap the long lines so they fit on the screen, then,
quite
properly, obey the newline at the end of the just-wrapped line.  Just one
of those
corner-cases that occur in any software system.

> So rather than crabbing at people about their line breaks, how about
> using a mail reader that handles the text intelligently?

And how would a mail-reader handle the above case intelligently?
Magically widen the screen or magically know which newlines to ignore?

> It's no different than telling people to use a less virus-friendly mail
> reader, or one that handles HTML messages safely.

Indeed.

Happy Pine user for over a decade,
  Aaron





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