Email Line Lengths

[Steve Lamb]

Tuesday, March 28, 2000, 12:45:41 PM, Michael wrote:
> It doesn't take much to push people right over the edge into personal
> attack, does it?

    Well, considering this is a topic that this list and many of its
individuals have had to explain, at length, on an average of once every 3
months for the past 5 years.... no.

> Thank you, I didn't know that. That's a pretty good reason to go to a
> fixed-length line. Though once again, in the long run it would be better to
> change the limitation.

    Changing it would be quite a task.  Not to mention it doesn't address the
plethora of other reasons for having line limits like the many people who use
terminals and not GUI to read mail which are, traditionally, limited to 80
characters.  Heck, 1/2 my outgoing mail these days is sent from mutt on my
Linux box' console.  80x50.

    The best reason, one that you cannot get around, is the fact that email
clients should not assume what is going on and wrap a long line in the first
place.  The client doesn't know what that blob of ASCII is representing.
/YOU/ don't know what it is representing and writing a technical specification
to address that would be an exercise in extreme futility.

    That is why the formatting of email is address by convention and not
standards.  We can break convention when it is needed.  For example, if I were
sending you code which could go up to 300 characters long, wrapping would be a
bad thing, esp. when quoting or forwarding to other people.  Enforcing
convention would break that.

    At the same time convention is that an 80 character wide screen is both
the minimum and maximum accepted limit.  IE, if someone were reading on a CoCo
3 with their 40 line wide screen, they'd have no right to really complain.  At
the same time someone with a 132 wide screen could get some extra use from
paragraph formatted lines but they really don't lose anything.  I should know,
I did read FidoNet echos on a 132 wide screen at one point.  Sure, part of the
screen went unused, but who cares?  I didn't because the extra space was nice
in other areas.  I'd much rather conform to the convention so that we can
remain on the same page, if you will, when it comes to communicating in this
medium.

> I don't see that a person's age has anything in particular to do with
> the validity of their arguments in this case.

    No, they aren't.  However, it has been the experience of a /lot/ of old
timers to networked communications (notice the difference between that and
"the internet") that it is the relative newbies, esp. the young ones, that
don't want to conform to the conventions that are, more often than not, older
than they are.

    Hell, I remember when I got my peepee wacked for doing the exact same
thing about, oh, 10-11 years ago on Fidonet.  ;)

> This is obviously some meaning of "standard" with which I am
> unacquainted.

    Convention, really, generally called "Good netiquette" which, to many
people, including myself, has the force of a standard except in rare cases
(one of which I cited above).  Trim quotes, interlace quotes with repies,
72-76 character maximum, quote with the > character, etc.

> I'm sorry, this is just supposed to be gibberish, right?

    Pardon Alexander, sometimes I feel his English, which I gather is not his
native tongue, doesn't lend to smooth communication.  I'm sure that if English
weren't my mother tongue I would be quite a bit more incomprehensible than I
normally am.  I do know that my Esperanto leaves a lot to be desired.  ;)

-- 
         Steve C. Lamb         | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
         ICQ: 5107343          | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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