Re: Wrapping long lines (Was Re: FAQ update suggestion for "I'm having basic problems with find. Why?")

[Eduardo Chappa <chappa at math dot washington dot edu>]

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:

:) > Any long lines coming into my mail reader are nicely wrapped
:) > according to whatever window width I configure.
:)
:) They are in mine too.  But look at the web archive of your message:
:) <http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2004-07/msg00178.html>.

Igor,

I happened to look at this message in Lynx and did not see anything bad
about it, then it ocurred to me that you were referring to a GUI browser.
This is the case when you are complaining about how it looks in your
browser (probably most people browser), but it's not a defect of the
message, per se (my logic is that it displays well in some browsers, bad
in others, then the problem is not the message, but the browser).

I do understand your concern, but not everyone presses return at the end
of a line (e.g. me), and you will have a hard time making people do that
(I've already written hundreds of messages without pressing return at the
end of the line). My *editor* has automatic wrapping which inserts those
CRs, and if it did not have them, you would see the same problem from me.
Some mailers are configured to send "format=flowed" text, which would
explain why you receive these long lines. This format is widely supported,
and is even supported by Pine 4.60.

format=flowed puts the burden on the receiving end, normally an e-mail
program, not a web browser, so if a web browser can not cope with this
requirement, the thing I would say is "do not use a web browser, use an
e-mail program, you are causing your own problem".

Having said all that, you are free to express your preference on how you
prefer that messages be sent to the list, but if you find that *your*
browser is having a problem, I would advise you to use another browser to
read such messages, or better yet an e-mail program that can cope with
such message. There are too many people in the world that are going to
subscribe to this list that will not know about this and will incurr in
this behavior, I do not think you want to police everyone in this list
(but maybe you do).

I like that you can click in "Raw Text" and see a more readable version of
this same message. That seems to be a good compromise.

-- 
Eduardo
http://www.math.washington.edu/~chappa/pine/

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