On 2013-02-21, Mike S <mi...@flatsurface.com> wrote: > On 2/21/2013 8:52 AM, Brian Utterback wrote: >> Having said that, I note that Ed Mischanko's mailer is not sending >> text/plain flowed. So unruh has a point in that case. >> >> On 2/21/2013 8:38 AM, Brian Utterback wrote: >>> Hate to get into a religious war here, but there is a hard, factual >>> standard here. RFC2646 which defines the MIME type text/plain format >>> parameter. > > RFC2646 isn't a standard. It's an RFC, just like RFC1149. The standard > is STD11 (from RFC822). It places no restriction on the length of lines > in the body. The planned replacement (draft standard) is RFC5322, which > is quite clear that an MUA which can't handle long lines is > "non-conformant." > > "2.1.1. Line Length Limits > > There are two limits that this specification places on the number of > characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than > 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding > the CRLF.
Note the "SHOULD" > > The 998 character limit is due to limitations in many implementations > that send, receive, or store IMF messages which simply cannot handle > more than 998 characters on a line. Receiving implementations would > do well to handle an arbitrarily large number of characters in a line > for robustness sake. However, there are so many implementations that > (in compliance with the transport requirements of [RFC5321]) do not > accept messages containing more than 1000 characters including the CR > and LF per line, it is important for implementations not to create > such messages. > > The more conservative 78 character recommendation is to accommodate > the many implementations of user interfaces that display these > messages which may truncate, or disastrously wrap, the display of > more than 78 characters per line, in spite of the fact that such > implementations are non-conformant to the intent of this > specification (and that of [RFC5321] if they actually cause > information to be lost)." note the "disasterously wrap" statement. Thus for example slrn does wrap the lines. And if the end of the line occurs in the middle of a word, tough. And there are others that do that. Note that rmc 5322 is 2008. Many of the news readers are older than that. _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions
