[geeks] Going with the (flowed)...

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 @ 10:25 -0500, Lionel Peterson said:

> IIRC (and I haven't gone back to check) the RFC said there was a big
> problem with line length, esp. when displayed on 30 character wide PDA
> displays...

The RFC is merely making a factual statement.  

Also, *ALL* RFCs are written to solve a problem or suggest a way of
handling things, so what's surprising about that?

> >Right.  The de-facto historical standard.
> 
> Based on what, Hollerith cards? 3270 Terminals? VT-100s? The default
> size of your Xterms?

No, the human eyeball. You start losing benefit of longer lines after
around 60 characters, and your scanning ability begins to degrade at
between 75 and 85 characters.

That's why most terminals are 80 characters or less. People with perfect
vision are generally OK to 96 characters, but all people actually read
and scan faster with less.

> >Sure, except that it has no particular way to know which emails it's
> >appropriate for.  That's why the spec calls for that information to be
> >attached to the message.
> 
> I think it's "too clever by half", which is why I've choosen not to
> switch mail clients to accomodate the cited RFC...

It's wordy, but that's mainly a matter of trying to fully explain the
standard.  I see nothing about that is trying to be clever, it just
seems to be technically wordy.

In other words, it looks like most other RFCs.

> IMHO, plain text is plain text, and your mail client should be able to
> display it in a meaningful way. 

It can't magically guess that, which is the real reason the RFCs were
written to cover this.

The solution is pretty simple: either properly format your text, or have
your client give the proper hints to show how it should be handled.

> If *I* am concerned about presentation of my emails, I'd send HTML
> formatted emails.

If you are concerned with presentation, why would you use a format that
has absolutely no presentation ability at all?


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