On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 07:45:05PM -0400, John Hawkinson wrote: > Derek Martin <inva...@pizzashack.org> wrote on Wed, 31 Aug 2022 > at 19:35:15 EDT in <20220831233515.gf13...@bladeshadow.org>: > > Evaluating the strength of a SHOULD requires looking at pragmatic > realities. And that reality is that lots of messages are sent > without hard line wraps.
That's true but the vast majority of that is HTML mail, which has
entirely different set of formatting rules and display parameters, and
again, not applicable here.
> Also, RFC5322 is not intended to be a standard that governs what
> user should do. It's for MTAs and MUAs and other mail software.
This is clearly not true, since it is the standard for the format of
the message, and the stated purpose is to ensure that recipients are
not negatively impacted by
implementations of user interfaces that display these messages
which may truncate, or disastrously wrap, the display of more
than 78 characters per line.
This isn't about transmission, it's about interface and display. The
user, far more than the MUA, controls the format of the message by how
they construct the message, which in your case does indeed
"disastrously wrap, the display of more than 78 characters per line"
on my end. Your MUA does nothing to correct it--though I could force
mine to. But as you say, it's extra work that is annoying, and I've
only even seen people do what you're doing a handful of times since
the 80's... usually by accident, or because they were brand-new e-mail
users unfamiliar with the etiquette...
And for the record, of the 8 people posting in this subthread
(starting with your post), 2 of them complained about your practice.
Perhaps your messages aren't as universally readable as you think.
Anyway, the reason this conversation ultimately never goes anywhere
useful is because there's already a perfectly viable means of
achieving your goal: HTML mail. Pretty formatting is literally what
it's for, and unlike format=flowed, or anything else you can imagine,
it's already widely adopted. That fact is largely why nothing else
will ever will be (at least until the next new thing is invented with
capabilities far superseeding HTML). If you're so concerned with ugly
wrapping, that's what you should be using. Otherwise, you should wrap
your lines like the standards and existing conventions say you should.
If it's just jagged right margins you don't like that's easily fixed
by justifying the text in your editor--solutions exist for common
editors, google them.
--
Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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