On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 04:42:13PM +0000, John Long wrote: > I wasn't going to post in this thread but... > > On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 04:16:44PM +0000, Tony's unattended mail wrote: > > On 2012-11-20, Chris Bannister <cbannis...@slingshot.co.nz> wrote: > > > > > > Ouch! Could you please set the "line wrap" value in your editor to a > > > sane value? 72 characters seems to be the recommended setting. > > > > That was the recommendation in the 90s. > > > > These days, any decent news reader has word wrap. Considering the > > variety of wide displays, it's no longer reasonable to impose a fixed > > text width on an author. > > That is just wrong. The problem isn't news readers, it's people posting from > web interfaces, especially google. I use slrn, probably the best all around > news reader out there and it doesn't wrap unless you tell it. But even that > looks bad. You can't make a sloppy pile of HTML or run-on sentences look > like a newsgroup post or an acceptable email. There are standards and there > is such a thing as common decency, even if it's less common than it was. > > Mail and news need to have sane line lengths. 72 or 76 chars are common. It > makes people look like AOL groupies when they post 500 character lines. Many > of us use console news clients and newsreaders. Is this discussion really > happening on a mailing list for mutt, a console email client? > > Take some responsibility for yourself and your content. Post like a man not > a webbot.
I cannot believe people are still hewing to this old line. It's like thousands of people fell asleep at their teletypes (I mean the kind that printed on paper) in the 1970s and woke up in 2012. "What, you have computers in your pockets but there is no conformance to the width in columns of 40 year-old data terminals any more?" Tony is right, it's not reasonable with the variety of display widths, today, to hold people to One, True Email Width. It's also not reasonable to demand that people rigidly conform with strict technical standards when software can (and should) do it for them. In other words, don't treat people like robots. The variety and richness of email is large and growing, but the power and variety of software for reading and writing email is pretty small. Every now and then some jerk sends me an email reply where their contribution is red. Maybe that is worth fighting about on grounds that that's a poor choice of color for readability, but not on grounds that my console is monochrome. I receive a lot of top-posted replies, bottom-posted replies, and inline replies. In conversations, sometimes there are mixtures of all three of those styles and then some---try to read those conversations three months later! Software could digest a lot of this email that doesn't conform to my taste, priorities, available time, attention, perceptual strengths and weaknesses, and spit out something that's not only more palatable but more useful, but software doesn't do that. One reason email software is not more useful is that because too many smart people wage a losing war on the new, foreign ways of email instead of programming filters that transform top-posted, red, 5000-column emails to the style of email that they want to read. That's just sad. Dave -- David Young dyo...@pobox.com Urbana, IL (217) 721-9981
