Ian Collier via Mutt-dev wrote in
<[email protected]>:
|On Thu, Aug 28, 2025 at 11:06:07PM +0200, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
|> and also to mention that RFC 3676 (text format=flowed) mistakenly
|> assumes ">" is the only quote character.
|
|No it doesn't. It *defines* ">" as the only quote character, when
I see, section "4.5. Quoting".
A little bit to my excuse, i have only glanced in a hurry over it.
I read it at least a decade ago, i think even longer, and that it
was in 2012/3, when Martin Neitzel asked for it (it surely was
like that, i implemented some "quote-fold" thing on 2012-08-27).
|using this format. If you are using format=flowed then you must
|quote with ">". If not then you can quote with anything you like
|(although naturally if you use something other than ">" then you
|have chosen unwisely).
|
|If you are generating format=flowed and quoting a received mail that
|wasn't in this format then you can either quote them verbatim (with ">"
|characters) and let the reader work it out, or try to convert their text
|to format=flowed (the latter might be frowned upon by pedants; the former
|by format purists).
I .. really never looked above that wall. I see it being used
quite often (Mozilla Thunderbird seems to use it when it generates
text/html alternative things, in fact one can get
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed; markup=markdown
which really sucks more i would think by myself), but, like
i said, for this MUA i maintain, i would have to create a bypass
in order to fit that in, and fork(2)ing a process for that stuff,
well, in the end it is a hobby.
I mean, i would love to have the functionality, as users can
then decide for themselves. I just added the *cols* variable
(intermediate quality) which overrules the well-known $COLUMNS
environment one if set, because especially the HTML email people
now get used to "simply write off".
Warner Losh of FreeBSD (i think it is ok to name him without
Bcc:ing him) is a leader of those pragmatic, which switched
to HTML (i think in parts because of the job, and then switch
on/off simplicity was initially a thing, if my very dim memory
gets this right), they now simply type what they want to say,
several hundred columns.
No more line break, often no real paragraphs, let alone gq{ or
fmt(1) filter for 66 columns or similar. And if $COLUMNS is 191,
then this is a problem.
So with =flowed or, here, so far, HTML, and *cols* things become
readable again.
|Ian Collier
--End of <[email protected]>
--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer, The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)
