On Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 07:10:14AM -0400, John Hawkinson wrote: > 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.
I think the fact that we're having this conversation suggests otherwise... > 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. I disagree--I find your messages rather hard to read, and beyond that long paragraphs run the risk of violating SMTP standards. I can't say I know how various MTAs handle lines longer than 998 characters, but I would expect at least a subset would either truncate them or reject your message... or at least that it would be wise to assume so. > [ 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 certainly agree that this is a stupid and annoying problem. It's been my experience that if you read your mail on anything other than a phone, the 72-character line width is fine, and even on a phone if you turn it sideways it's still fine. My preferred solution, then, has been to stick with following the standards and assume that if you insist on reading mail on a hand-held device that can't accommodate the standard, and/or refuse to rotate it so that it can, then you get what you get, it's your choice and the consequences of your choice are on you. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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