On Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 09:47:46PM +0000, Tony's unattended mail wrote: > > It's been pointed out that this number comes from scientific studies > > regarding the ergonomics of reading. > > Sure, but not in what I quoted and responded to for which you're now > responding. You bring a new argument.
Actually that isn't true. Someone else mentioned it earlier in this thread, though they were less explicit than I was, and I didn't save the message to quote or refer to it. But you also have to understand that this is not the first time this issue has come up on the list, it's been discussed numerous times before, and will be discussed ad nauseum well into the future. If you search the archives, you will find references to it. Literally nothing has changed since the first time it showed up, many years ago. It's the same argument that keeps getting rehashed over and over; only the players are different. > BTW, sending a variable width format allows for 72 character > rendering, so these dated ergonomics studies are not at odds with an > unwrapped source text anyway. Then you're not paying attention. It's already been discussed in this thread that using flowed formatting (the only "variable width formatting" for which there is a standard, and is actually in use) doesn't allow one to *both* flow text, and specify that some text be not formatted. For purely conversational e-mails it works great (though I think it's still true that Mutt's handling of it needs improvement), but it is not a universal solution. RFC 2646 makes no provision for including lines which should not be wrapped or which should be treated as pre-formatted, but one is needed for e-mails containing things like tables, code, etc. Besides, if you think getting everyone to quote e-mail properly is hard, just go ahead and try to get the entire world to switch to format=flowed. > Moreover, you would be hard-pressed to find a study that concludes the > same when the display device is a smartphone. Sorry, wrong. As has been already pointed out in this thread, the focus of the study is irrespective of media. The fact that your smart phone can't display 80 characters is a failure of the media, and does not change the fact that the ideal line length for humans to read is around 80 characters. However: > Blindly accepting studies without consideration to their time period > and other artifacts might have you flipping your smartphone sideways > to attempt to achieve 72 characters in a reasonable font, but I > think you'll be disappointed with the results. Actually I do read e-mail on my smart phone, and I do turn it to landscape orientation to do so for any but the most trivial of messages, regardless of whether the message flows and/or fits in portrait mode. Quite simply, I find it more comfortable to read that way; and no, I am not disappointed with the results. > > So the one million smokers argument is a red herring. > > Nonsense. Calling out a fallacy (bandwagon in this case) is not a red > herring any more than the original comment is a red herring. Except the ideal line length has been proven (to the extent that such is possible) scientifically to not be a fallacy. In contrast, smoking has been proved to be detrimental to your health. Hence you are using an irrelevant (but true) argument to attempt to discredit an argument which is proved true; and thus it IS a red herring, by definition. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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