=== Lurk-Mode OFF === I hesitate to be drawn in... but...
See what a hot-button topic formatting is? Will, Do you equate quoted text with ">" characters at the beginning of lines? Think about it. Embedding that stuff in the actual messages is dumb, don't you agree? It could/should be handled as meta-data in the message header (or, more recently, as MIME blocks). Embedding such stuff means adding rigidity to message format, having to create escapes for those times when the user wants to type ">" into a message, and the whole problem of reflow. Consider a message line that begins "From ". You can't create such a line without the sending application adding ">" in front of the word "From". That's just plain dumb. === Lurk-Mode ON === On 2014/9/14 7:29 PM, Will Yardley wrote: > On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 07:05:17PM -0400, Mark Filipak wrote: >> >> I created a minor civil war on the Mozilla list when I proposed that >> text NOT be flowed at all; that it's the responsibility of the viewing >> application to format messages to the user's specification; that >> formatting should NOT be coded within messages. Flowing and rewrapping >> doesn't work right in any email program I've ever seen. (But as you see, >> I'm wrapping text, so you can infer who won the civil war > > I think the idea of encoding text so that quoted text can be displayed > properly on various types of devices is important -- maybe even more > important now with all the large monitors and tiny devices we read on. > > The problem, though, is that doing so in a tool like mutt where the > editor is (by design) completely divorced from the MUA does make it a > lot more difficult to properly generate flowed text. > > w > > . >
