Uwe Klein <u...@klein-habertwedt.de> wrote: > Rob wrote: >> David Woolley <david@ex.djwhome.demon.invalid> wrote: >> >>>>The "difficult to read" affects only those with very old software that >>>>does not wrap long lines automatically. >>> >>>This doesn't remove the fact that they do not comply with the standards, >>>basically because early Windows email software seems to have been >>>written by people who failed to familiarise themselves with the standards. >> >> >> I think that is the only point in the discussion. Early in the development >> of electronic communications, some poor decisions were made and they >> were called standards. People who devised them were too proud to admit >> that they were not the be-all and end-all of development. After all it >> was what THEY came up with and it had to remain as it was. >> > Actually all these "wrong" standards enabled wide interoperability. > They were/are all rather carefully established.
This is true for some standards, but certainly not for the standard to use 80-character lines. That was just lazyness and adherance to capabilities of hardware available at the time. When graphical screens became mainstream, and scalable windows and proportional fonts entered the scene, the 80-character line was obsolete. Only, the existing users failed to realize this because they often stuck to existing hardware or emulated existing hardware on new environments. (including running a 80x25 terminal emulator on Windows) When they finally left their bubble, it turned out the world around them had changed. In fact, it has happened again later. Now, people want to read their mail on small phone screens, and again they prefer wrapped paragraphs over fixed line lengths. For the majority of the users there is no problem because they already switched to that system before, but those who want 80-character lines again have a problem. _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions
