On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 01:46:49PM -0400, John Hawkinson wrote: > Derek Martin <inva...@pizzashack.org> wrote on Wed, 31 Aug 2022 > at 13:39:42 EDT in <20220831173942.gb13...@bladeshadow.org>: > > > 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. > > That'd be true if we were sending emails to ourselves > but a lot of us send email to people who read their mail primarily > or exclusively on phones and in desktop GUIs that don't approximate > 72-chars.
I don't see why this matters, because as I already pointed out, any desktop GUI MUA will have no trouble displaying 72 character lines wrapped as they are, and any *reasonable* mobile can do the same by rotating it. Where there IS significant difficulty, however, is with lines that wrap unevenly, because the display is too narrow to display the whole line, as well as with lines that are too long. Neither mobile nor desktop clients inherently impose this problem on their users; but YOU do, when you choose to manually wrap your lines either too long or too short, or not at all. If, as the user, your complaint is extra white space at the end of the line, increase the font size (either desktop or mobile) or change the width of your desktop client. That, too, is a choice that's on you. If your issue is that you have to make the text too big to fit so you can read it, then either you need to update the prescription of your glasses so you can make the text smaller, or if that's not a viable fix for you, then you have simply made the wrong choice of device for your needs. > What tends to happen is those people psychologically view > hard-wrapped 72-char emails as ugly and they become a far less > effective means of communication than other people's emails are, > regardless of conscious choice. This is unscientific nonsense. There actually is significant psychological research into the ideal line length for reading. There's some variation, but the consensus seems to come in at about 60-75 characters, at a width of roughly 4-5". I won't cite sources because they are ubiquitous; you can google them yourself. Long lines cause problems for readers because the length makes it difficult to find where (vertically) the lines begin and end. Short lines cause problems because of too much scanning back and forth, breaking the reader's rhythm. Works well for poetry (where the rhythm is largely the point), but not much else. Nearly all modern hand-helds are within a reasonable margin of being 4-5" long, and can easily display 75-character lines within their length, so again rotating the phone makes it perfectly readable, and actually provides pretty close to optimal reading conditions. Anyone who's reading e-mail regularly on a Nokia 8210 is an idiot, and deserves what they get for intentionally choosing to do something so idiotically counterproductive. > It's great if you can choose the people who read your emails I don't know anyone in that boat; and even if I did, it doesn't counter a single thing I've said. > As for standards-compliance, that's a red herring. Long lines are > not going to trip up any modern client, they're just not. It may be less relevant today, but it's still relevant. While the original reason for the standard was that the myriad of clients would display long lines improperly or not at all, these days it's not really about clients. Sendmail truncates lines at 998 characters. It is not alone. [It's conceivable this has become untrue since last I checked, but I doubt it, and assuming so is not wise. Besides which, I'd be shocked to discover that all internet sites are on the most modern versions of their MTAs. It just doesn't happen.] But as for the clients, Kurt is correct that modern clients will use QP format to avoid long lines. But that doesn't help you if you are stuck using a legacy client you don't have control over for whatever reason (as a former sysadmin I've seen this type of problem more times than I can count), or generate messages via a script that sends the body directly to sendmail, etc.. The bottom line is there is absolutely no reason why hard-wrapped lines of plain text at 72 characters should ever need to display unreadably for any desktop user, or even anyone on any reasonable mobile device which can rotate lines parallel to their longer side, that doesn't boil down to the choice of the user. Flouting the standards is a bad habit to be in. They exist for good reason; if you choose to abandon them you do so at your own peril, and the rest of us should not be expected to accommodate 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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