On 10/19/2011 08:04 PM, Xenophaneros Anartaxius wrote: > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend"<jstein@...> wrote: >> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu<noozguru@> wrote: >> <snip> >>> What you quoted of mine formats just fine in Thunderbird. If your >>> browser pane is too small on the web site it may not format properly but >>> most people have newer widescreen monitors that have plenty of room to >>> display lines. >> On my monitor, which is widescreen, two of the above lines >> are broken in the Reply window. Let's see what happens to >> them when my post appears. >> >> It can also be helpful to use a smaller font when viewing >> posts on the Web site. >> >>> But Turq is about the only person who does archaic hard >>> returns. >> Wrong. I do as well, and so does Willytex. >> >>> Nobody should have to go out of their way to format for web >>> forums. >> You're forgetting what happens when someone responds >> to a post via the Web site. The software adds hard >> returns to the end of every line (if there isn't one >> already) and two characters (>[space]) to the beginning >> of every line. The result is that longer lines get >> broken instead of wrapping, and it gets worse the >> longer an exchange goes on. >> >> But the extra characters at the beginnings of lines >> make a conversation so much easier to follow; you >> always know who's written what by how many> >> characters precede the lines. The early BBS readers >> were so much better at this. >> >> And boy, if we could all just remember to SNIP >> stuff we aren't responding to, reading posts would >> be so much more pleasant. >> >> >> That's 50 for me and out until the weekend. >> > I do not use hard returns (usually) in my replies to posts. Yahoo's software > adds the HTML break element at the end of each line, using whatever value > they are using to determine line length. > > In the email digests, which I get, but seldom look at, all those break > elements remain for the material I am responding too, but do not appear in my > reply, the line breaks of the most recent reply are determined by the width > of the window within the page that yahoo sends in those digests, and the > window itself does not appear if browser scripting is turned off. > > The Rich-Text editor also seems to do something different, so there is no > consistent way to get a consistent result, though using hard returns and > keeping lines short probably is most successful. The only really successful > thing is to reformat all the messages each time you send them, and that > nobody probably has time to do. > > And this is just using Yahoo's interfaces. If you send an email through some > other software, it probably will add another element of uncertainly to the > process. > > In general, except for poetry, and a few other things, electronic text needs > to reflow because window sizes on different computers and devices varies > widely, from cell phones to wide cinema types of display. This is how ebooks > are formatted for devices such as the Kindle, Nook, iPad, so they remain > readable if people need different font sizes to be able to see (like us old > folks). In other words, the tendency to want text to look a particular way is > becoming a hindrance to making that text available on a wide range of > equipment. > > Basically paragraph breaks need to be kept intact. Some software however will > not reflow long lines, it just runs off the page to the right.
I don't know of any other group or forum where people bother with hard line feeds anymore unless as you say you are trying to format something like poetry. The idea notion would probably bring great laughs from geeks on programming forums. And of course writing computer code is an area where you do use hard line feeds or breaks. Yahoo sends out two copies of each post in the email, one in plain text and another HTML formatted.
