Mark Brown wrote: > > On Fri, Jul 23, 1999 at 12:43:37AM +0000, Lee Elliott wrote: > > > Sorry to have peeved you, I do this deliberately so that paragraphs format > > OK regardless of window size (I'm only able to check this on YAM & Outlook) > > - for me, reading: > > Don't do that! The standard line length is 80 columns, and all sane > mail clients can display that without problems. Most Unix mail clients > do *not* do word wrapping in either display mode (spacing may be > signifigant) or when editing replies (there's no way to tell if you > really did intend to write a 1000 column line or if you just didn't put > in any line breaks, making line-mode operations useless when editing > unless the message is re-formatted and requoted). > > This makes your messages very hard to read (especially if the window is > actually wider than 80 columns - 80 columns is actually a pretty good line > length for displaying block text), and means that when people reply to you > your message will be improperly quoted (one mark at the start of the > paragraph) and often won't have context snipped properly. > The issue here is using "quoted-printable", which is what Lee was doing, and which I used to do before I learned how people hate it. It actually looks very nice indeed in a GUI mail reader like Netscape or (I assume) YAM, wrapping to the window size.
The currently accepted method (hard line breaks at a certain column) can break down if you have enough nested levels of quotes. Only HTML (among formats that some readers can handle) really handles nested quotes well, IMHO. It's got a tag just for it. Do any text-based readers handle HTML (by spawning Lynx or something)? Just curious; I wouldn't *dare* post HTML here. ;-)
