Email Line Lengths

[Michael Baum]

On Tue, 28 Mar 2000 13:45:00 -0800, Fr. Shrink wrote:

>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.

Dunno, Steve. This may say that you're swimming against the tide.
Nothing wrong with that, of course.

>    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.

I wonder how many people that _really_ represents, world-wide, in
these days of OS/2, Windows-Whatever, Macintosh, Acorn and
X-Windows? I will grant you that when I'm working on me trusty
Linux server over here, I rarely if ever fire up X-Windows,
prefering the simple console interface, but I'm na' so sure that's
typical. You might _feel_ that there's a lot of you out there, but
I'd be curious to see some documented numbers.

>    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.

But, don't you see, they do it All The Time. That's _exactly_ my
point.  Indenting each line of a quote and then wrapping the
resulting line to fit an outgoing length is what causes the erratic
line lengths that Dr. Race was just complaining about (q.v.). 
Listen. You all win. I really don't care passionately about this.
But some of these arguments in favor of hard-coding the line
lengths in email messages just don't have any logical consistency.
P'aps best discussed over a beer. After Lent.

....

> 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.  ;)

Hate those formative experiences, don't you? :)

>    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.  ;)

Truth. Fact is, Alexander's command of English is a damn sight
better better than my command of, oh, say, German. I shouldn't have
tweaked him so. Don't know what came over me. It was probably
before I'd had my afternoon tea.

Michael