On Jun 4, 2004, at 18:13, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
Joe H writes:
On Thu, 3 Jun 2004, James A Baker wrote:yeah, that is the problem I'm having.On Jun 3, 2004, at 07:06, Brian Candler wrote:
I believe he's talking about the text in plain text messages that's wrapped in PRE tags, which typically prevents line wrapping in well-behaved browsers.
Plain text cannot be rewrapped, unless it uses the flowed-text format. Messages sent from sqwebmail are rewrappable only because they use the flowed-text format.
Unless you know where the paragraph breaks are, you cannot rewrap plain text. One newline is just like any other newline. You cannot make half-assed assumption, otherwise you'll screw up messages that are intentionally formatted for a specific line width, such as tabular data.
Granted, Sam... It's going to look like s*** with some data... maybe even most text. But that doesn't necessarily mean there are no situations / environments where it wouldn't be desirable anyway. -- I mean, how many people these days send plain text tabular data? Personally, I think it still has its uses occasionally, but really "how many?"
So, if a site / group / whatever has a use for doing this, then... *shrug* So be it.
Now, completely reflowing the text, either with substituted tags (i.e. TT or such) or with CSS setting "white-space: normal", it will absolutely be a nightmare IMO to read even simple (i.e. non-tabular) messages, since they'll be converted to a single paragraph. -- Ick! That's hard to read!
But if he can find (and people accessing his site will use) a browser that supports the pre-wrap CSS value I mentioned... then the newlines won't disappear and the spacing runs will remain formatted.
[aside]
Joe, actually, I did a quick Google search and found that Mozilla, Opera and IE apparently support the feature using 3 different values! (Arggg! What's the point of standards if nobody follows them?!?!?!) ... Try one of these for the time being I suppose -- or a combination if you can figure out the necessary CSS bugs/hacks to use to make them each active only in their own browsers:
Mozilla uses "white-space: -moz-pre-wrap;"
Opera 7.5 appears to support the proper value "white-space: pre-wrap;"
some earlier Opera versions appear to have used "white-space: -o-pre-wrap;"
IE uses "word-wrap: break-word;"
I tested the Mozilla one for myself in 1.5 and it works there. I don't have Opera nor IE to test on though.
[/aside]
Anyway... I don't know that he'd be happy with that either, Sam, since it'll still look like crap for lots of messages... But at least in that solution, he gets to keep his paragraphs separated and tabular data would be no worse than in a text editor that has line-wrapping turned on. (Which is not to say it would be in any way "good" of course. ;-)
For that matter, if it is important enough to him and his users to not scroll horizontally, that he's willing to switch to other tags like TT and thereby lose paragraph delineation and tabular data layouts... then that's his decision to make I think. I don't believe he was asking anyone to consider making a change to the SqWebMail source anywhere except at his own installation. So where's the harm?
Well... That's just my input. Worth $.02 or not, there it is.
-jab
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