21 May
2012
21 May
'12
6:11 p.m.
On 05/21/2012 09:03 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
Yow! This is not the world-wide web. The formatting of text is up to
the person doing the typing. There are accepted conventions for how
this works, and they work for everyone (except apparently you).
I am NOT trying to start an argument here, but it is my opinion that
you're trying to treat email as something that it isn't.
I'm not trying to treat email like anything.
Hard line-wrapped text is broken and cannot be reflowed.
This is a fact; it is not open to debate. It is the case, it always
has been the case.
Doing that deliberately is just *rude*, and any email client that
can't line-wrap text is so very very broken that it is pathetic. That
would have been intolerable when I started out with email in 1985; I
cannot believe *any* modern MUA is that defective.
We're in agreement there. I'm saying that the line-wrapping should
(and pretty much always has, all the way back to the BBS days) happen on
the SENDING end. Email isn't a "format it any way you want to READ it"
medium like the WWW was intended to be (but really isn't). It's a
"format it any way you want to WRITE it" medium.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
>> [nit:
please consider hitting RETURN every 75 chars or so]
>
> Please don't. Hard line-wrap has been a PITA since the 1960s and still is.
How, exactly, is it a PITA?
Because hard-wrapped text won't reflow, so if you resize your email
window - or use a wider terminal if you're that way inclined - it
stays stuck in a narrow strip down the left hand edge of your screen.
By the same token, use a narrower window, or simply increase the font
size, and it breaks into pieces, making it particularly unfair and
unfriendly for people with low vision or other eyesight problems.