> It is also a long-outstanding Usenet convention and documented in
> RFC 3676, thus not just a matter of taste.
It is an abomination.
The whole point of plain text is that its meaning can be ascertained
by a human reading it. Anything not visible to the eye should be
projected out by the mapping to semantics. Semantics should be
invariant to a print-OCR loop.
The fact that this came from USENET is no coincidence: USENET was full
of losers, and this is the kind of shallow lossage they generated.
If an RFC mandated jumping off a bridge while tracking your trajectory
in a file conforming to the ISO/IEC IS 29500 Office Open XML file
format, would you do it? This trailing-white-space business is an
awful and counterproductive convention and should be retired. And any
program which has the unfortunate ability to generate it by default
should provide a simple option for turning it off.
--Barak.
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