On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 02:48:55PM -0500, Derek Martin <inva...@pizzashack.org> wrote:
> The bottom line is there is absolutely no reason why hard-wrapped > lines of plain text at 72 characters should ever need to display > unreadably for any desktop user, or even anyone on any reasonable > mobile device which can rotate lines parallel to their longer side, > that doesn't boil down to the choice of the user. Flouting the > standards is a bad habit to be in. They exist for good reason; if you > choose to abandon them you do so at your own peril, and the rest of us > should not be expected to accommodate you. > > -- > Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 > -=-=-=-=- I hard wrap at 55 to leave plenty of room for later quoting. I often receive replies from MUAs that wrap quoted text badly (as though they don't know what quoted text is) and so I try to reduce the likelihood of that. Strangely, it seems that some MUAs that treat each line as a paragraph seem to insert an additional newline after each line in what they quote as part of a reply, so I receive replies with a quoted blank line between each original line. It's almost as though they want to think that each line is a separate paragraph on input, but they're not entirely convinced, so for output, they make sure it's a "real" paragraph by adding a blank line between each input "paragraph". It doesn't make a lot of sense. Either a newline marks a paragraph or it doesn't. They can't make up their minds. I sometimes spend time cleaning up this sort of thing (or just removing quote trails), but it would never occur to me to complain to the sender about the formatting of their email. There's no point. Similarly, noone has ever complained about my emails. They might (or might not) have seen them as untidy, but I don't agree that that makes them any less effective as a means of communication. And I wouldn't worry about a recipient thinking that my emails aren't as nice as someone else's. The content of one person's emails would never be the same as the content of someone else's emails, so there is no meaning to any comparison like that. The best definition of technology that I ever heard was: "Anything that doesn't work properly yet". Once technology works properly, we give it a permanent name like chair, or hammer, or pencil. :-) So it's best if everyone just cuts everyone else a lot of slack when it comes to what technology does to our written communications. If someone has too much trouble doing that, for whatever reason (and I'm sure there are valid reasons), and they are receiving emails that do bother them to read, they could consider not reading emails on phones. There are many other reasons to not read email on phones. This might just be another one. Even excluding the whole short attention-span dopamine training thing, I know someone who is often very frustrated with the mail app on their iphone for often not being able to display emails that it composed and sent, complaining that the sender created a malformed email (a bug people have complained about for 10+ years that shows no sign of every being fixed), or emails from one person that are displayed with a different person altogether as the sender). In the grand scheme of things, lines that aren't all the same length seems unimportant. But it's obviously fun to talk about. :-) It would have been great if all of the obvious suspects had been willing at any point in the last 20+ years to pay just one of their many thousands of programmers to spend a little time to implement format=flowed. That would be the best solution to this "problem". But it seems they really really don't want that solution to exist for some reason best known only to themselves. I don't think it's fair or reasonable to blame the senders of emails for a problem caused by the company that created the deliberately limited MUA that the recipient uses, let alone expect those senders to all individually solve the problem. I'd use format=flowed if there was any point, but it doesn't seem that there is. It never makes sense to expect a large number of entities to each solve a problem that could be solved by a tiny number of (more powerful) entities. It's just not efficient or practical or likely to work reliably. cheers, raf
