Kurt Hackenberg <k...@panix.com> wrote on Mon, 29 Aug 2022 at 02:58:32 EDT in
<ywxjmguyakvbd...@rain.home>:
> If you put a newline only at the end of a paragraph, it won't be displayed
> correctly by software that doesn't expect that. Such software will probably
> either break each line exactly at the right margin, maybe in the middle of a
> word, or display a paragraph as a single very long line, maybe with a scroll
> bar.
THe point of my statement is to say that this is not a problem in practice, no.
One of the problems with email is there are so many different clients out there
that run on so many differnet devices and are configurable in so many different
ways that it's not possible to make any kind of absolute statement ("this
always works") beyond statements about standards conformance, which have to be
tempered with pragmatic reality. And furthermore it's quite different with
different cultural groups; there are some people ("this business world") that
only use some kinds of clients, and others (err...the elite hacker world? ha
ha) who only use some other kinds, and sometimes these groups don't
intercommunicate enough for there to be an awareness of how the others operate.
One example of this is the whole "don't top post / replies inline" versus "ONLY
top-post here!" -type debates, where both sides are entirely ignorant of the
merits of the other's positions.
But I can confidently say that after years of doing this, omitting newlines
from internal line breaks in paragraphs has proved to be a much better
compromise than including them. It displays much better in a wide array of
clients, especially modern ones (webmail clients, mobile clients), and is not
particularly problematic in classical clients (like mutt).
[ I think, also, that without doing a survey of a wide variety of readers, it's
tough to appreciate the scope of this problem. I had NO IDEA how bad my
hard-wrapped emails used to format for people using clients like Outlook until
I looked into it explicitly. People just don't tend to talk about things like
that unless you press them. Although they do make value judgements ("XYZ's
emails are hard to read.") ]
(This email reminds me that a derivative question is how to handle quoted text.
I usually continue to wrap quoted text at 72 chars with hard line breaks, as
I've done in this message. I don't worry too much about quoted text being
inconveniently formatted in readers that deal with multiple screen sizes,
although maybe I should.
> One solution would be to invent a new MIME type, say text/paragraph, for
This is obviously a non-starter when the goal is to interoperate with today's
technology as much as possible.
> Maybe text/plain format=flowed is a solution. It's displayed correctly by
Maybe.
--
jh...@alum.mit.edu
John Hawkinson
> software that assumes format=fixed (on a screen that's wide enough), and at
> any width by software that understands format=flowed. Mutt can display
> format=flowed correctly at any width, if it's configured to.
>
> Do phone mail readers understand text/plain format=flowed?
