On 2012-11-21, Rado Q <l%...@gmx.de> wrote: > > I guess you put too much interpretation/ meaning in plain-text/ > "text/plain": LF is just that, nothing else, 2 LF are a paragraph, > that's it.
"Too much" interpretation is an odd stance to take. It's a necessary amount of interpretation in order to understand the problem. If you fail to interpret the LF sensibly, you end up producing a client that fails to render a text in the most readable way. > If you want to put more semantics into it, you should use something > else than plain-text, like HTML or even more structured formats. Sure, these are options, options with further problems. Unnecessary options. It is quite possible to use plain text to convey a message that has meaningful LFs. > While you expect readers to narrow down too long lines, This expectation is what a reader places on their own rendering tool. Or not-- if they stubborn about moving away from a poor quality reader, they can ignore unwrapped messages. Where I object is when someone with a poor quality tool tries to impose a format on an author for not catering to an unknown readers tool that renders poorly. This idea of forcing users to adapt to those with poor quality tools enables the poor quality tools to go uncorrected. It's tools that serve humans, not the contrary. So we should not make humans into crutches for lousy tools. > you deny unwrapping because you _assume_ there is more meaning to LF > than just that. What do you mean "just that"? LF means "begin next line now". So as an author posting text to a forum, at what point do you need an LF? Not after XX width, because that makes poor assumptions about the readers medium (is it an LCD, or a phone?). If it's the end of a line of poetry, or source code, sure, then it's appropriate to call for a new line. > Hmm... how often does this really apply? More than zero percent. Which means you need reasonable rationale to advocate for assigning an ambiguous role to the LF. > More often than not plain-text is just plain-text and no poem. ;) > Then unwrapping is as easy as wrapping. Then it's a wash in those other cases, and doesn't matter, so there's no sense in discussing such cases. >> OTOH, in the case of outlook users doing a reply-all, there is >> nothing a filtering tool can do to make it right because order is >> not guaranteed. It would impose an unreasonable amount of >> sophistication for the filtering tool to hold on to every message >> and check it against the proper list distribution (and even if >> this were practical, it would slow down your mail). So in this >> case, it makes sense for responders to have a list-reply feature >> and/or honor the mail-followup-to header. > > mailman (and majordomo?) have "duplicate checks". That feature causes the favorable (list distributed) message to be withheld, while the unfavorable (direct) message gets through. Which means haphazard filtering because of the lacking headers. The list cannot drop the message that goes direct from the sender to the user.
