*** Brian Dessent ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote in the cygwin list today: :) Nowhere did I claim that SHOULD was equivalent to MUST. And yes I know :) the difference. :) :) My point was simply that if a RFC describes a normative procedure then :) that lends weight to the argument that if at all possible, you should :) do it that way. Read my last line again, "Just because you can do :) something [send emails with long lines] doesn't mean you should :) [because the standards ask that you not]".
Hello Brian, Yes, you said that. Let me explain why my answer was like it was. It was due to the fact that you brought a RFC that does not take any position about an issue to support a claim. In my opinion, this is the same as saying that Neruda said so. The fact that we do not send lines longer than 80 characters is a historical fact, already well justified. That the RFC says so, is irrelevant, and if your final point is that "not everything that can be done should be done", although true is weakened by the text of the RFC, which actually allows it. In a general sense I agree with you, in this particular case, I don't because clients MUST be prepared to accept lines of length up to 998 characters. If they do not spend a few CPU cycles to transform this into a readable message is up to the programmer of such client. All of this means that you can not transform a mail message to a html just by adding tags, there must be some processing of the message before those tags are added, certainly adding <pre></pre> is a choice, not the best as it has been demonstrated. Having said all this, I think that the world is moving (slowly) toward flowed text (due to the fact that eventually most of "us" will read at least part of our e-mail in a PDA like electronic object, but that is still several years away), I think that long lines are going to be more popular with time. Do I like it? no, but I think it's unavoidable, and we should just be tolerant, because it has good benefits when you use the right tool to read such messages. -- Eduardo http://www.math.washington.edu/~chappa/pine/ -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
