On Fri, 16 Feb 2001, Kevin D. Clark wrote:
> What does your mail program do when it sees this?:
>
> A damsel with a dulcimer / In a vision once I saw: / It was an Abyssinian
> maid, / And on her dulcimer she played, / Singing of Mount Abora. / Could
> I revive within me / Her symphony and song,
It broke the line on spaces, presenting a wrapped paragraph, begining with a
single right-angle-bracket (>), and colored the entire paragraph with the
color I have configured for first-level quoted text.
When I replied, it maintained the original line as a single line, wider than
80 columns. I then used the [CTRL]+[J] command to wrap it, which handled the
quote leader (>) for me.
> If Pine wraps this line, does it prepend a '>' on the wrapped line(s)?
No.
> If "no", doesn't this look horrible in everyday practical use? (especially
> when quoting)
No, because of the colored text. See above.
> If "yes", great, but what if I send you an ASCII picture that gets wrapped
> by PINE, thus rendering it unusable?
If you send me an ASCII picture wider than my terminal, it is going to look
crappy, regardless.
If I then widen by terminal window, Pine "unwraps" the text as the window
gets wider, allowing me to view the picture as intended.
If I instead save the message to a file, the original message is preserved,
formatting (or lack thereof) intact. I could then use something like "less
-S" to try and scroll-and-view the picture.
> I'm a member of the "try not to send email with lines >79 characters"
I agree, but I also agree with the "Be generous in what you accept, and
strict in what you produce" theory of operation.
> ... and the "mailers shouldn't touch the contents of email messages"
Pine is not modifying the contents of the message; it is handling
presentation of the message intelligently. This is an important distrinction.
Any mailer more advanced than /bin/mail (which simply spews to stdout) handles
presentation. Paging, MIME decoding, multiple character sets, HTML mail,
etc., all require the rendering agent to do some processing. Certainly XEmacs
does! :-)
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Net Technologies, Inc. <http://www.ntisys.com>
Voice: (800)905-3049 x18 Fax: (978)499-7839
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