Frank Farance
Sat, 25 Dec 1999 15:51:10 -0800
At 15:28 1999-12-25 -0800, Steve Lamb wrote: > Saturday, December 25, 1999, 3:17:58 PM, Frank wrote: > > So RFC 822 makes no restrictions on the lengths of text lines in the *body* > > of an E-mail message. RFC 822 *does* make restrictions on the length of > > lines in E-mail *headers*, but that is not the issue we're discussing. > > Gah, wrap your lines, just don't argue about it. Geez. I can't believe > you're trying to defend Eudora, breaker of RFCs extraordinaire. I'm not trying to defend Eudora. See below. > > RFC 822 makes no restrictions like you describe above. Lines of a *message > > body* can be arbitrarily long according to RFC 822. Can you point me to such > > restrictions in RFC 822? > > > Over to you ... > > Fine, RFC821, Page 43, section 4.5.3. > > > text line > > The maximum total length of a text line including the > <CRLF> is 1000 characters (but not counting the leading > dot duplicated for transparency). True. But I was mainly interested in "logical" lines ... which can be arbitrarily long, right? That's the way I read RFC 2045. I only referenced RFC 822 because Alexander said that long lines violated RFC 822. In one of my prior messages, I suggested that the focus is really RFC 2045. > Common convention is to wrap your lines, just do it. Jeez. Wrapping lines is *one* convention and not the only one. I used to do that, but I found that many messages got messed up when people copied and pasted my words. Really, for almost 20 years I did what you describe. I've come around to thinking that the paragraph separator is good for *text* (and people seem to have fewer copy/paste problems, too, ... something to think about with these long lines). Natually, if I'm sending a snippet of code to some one I'll send it as is (usually, margins are less then 80 columns). The only time the very-long-lines convention is a problem is during *display* ... which is why one of my original points claimed this was a *display* issue for The Bat, not an RFC issue. Alexander is the one who started the claim that this was all an RFC issue ... I just think it's a display preference ... and I hope The Bat will include this type of preference in future releases. Both conventions are useful. I happen to use very-long-lines for text, and properly wrapped lines for code. -FF ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Frank Farance, Farance Inc. T: +1 212 486 4700 F: +1 212 759 1605 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.farance.com Standards, products, services for the Global Information Infrastructure -- -------------------------------------------------------------- View the TBUDL archive at http://tbudl.thebat.dutaint.com To send a message to the list moderation team double click here: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To Unsubscribe from TBUDL, double click here and send the message: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------