22 Jun
2010
22 Jun
'10
12:05 p.m.
On Jun 22, 2010, at 11:26 AM, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
That said, the only mandate is that paragraph length
be less than 998
characters, so the line is still technically compliant. It is, however,
still a very long line no matter how wide your terminal is.
Allow me to be more specific. See the raw message at http://fedl.info/a/messageoutput.txt
as delivered back to me by the mailing list.
The message is encoded using MIME type text/plain, Content-Transfer-Encoding:
quoted-printable, as discussed in RFC 2045 and the follow-ups to the same. Under that
encoding method, soft line breaks are inserted as "=[CR]" before the 76th (?)
character. Most text mailers like Pine treat that as a line break, not making the
"=" visible to the end user. Mailers on bitmapped platforms (see: just about
any modern computer) treat this as a signal to flow the text and not provide a hard line
break, as suggested in RFC 3676.
I suspect what is happening is whatever user agent he is using is removing the =20 and not
replacing it with a native line break. In short, "that's not my problem",
his MUA is disobeying his wishes.
As to Fred's comment about Microsoft.. like it or not Microsoft has seats on the IETF.
As the publisher of software programs that a majority of Internet users use to access the
Internet, that seems appropriate. The RFC in question was actually written by somebody
from Qualcomm, and it was designed to address small-format screens such as cell phones and
PDAs while still allowing text to flow naturally using windowed operating systems on
bitmapped displays. The RFC makes a lot of sense given the nature of Internet access
today, and solves a good number of issues (oddly enough, precisely this one is mentioned
in that RFC).
For the record: this is Apple's Mail.app on Mac OS X 6 that's doing this behavior.
And it's not the first mailer I've ever used that does it. It's the right
way to do it, and provided everybody follows the RFC properly (ahem) everybody wins and
nobody loses. It allows those who need a fixed format to have it, and for those who like
text to flow naturally on whatever screen size they are using to have that: even if
it's 22-column text on a Commodore VIC-20.