Hi Dean,
On 6 Aug 2004 at 11:51, Dean Jackson spoke, thus:
> Can you please advise us what exactly is the issue here? there are a
> couple of things your email could refer to, hence the question. You might
> also give us an example if you've discovered a complex issue.
This is the issue where BrailleNote does not wrap its lines in messages.
Netiquette and the limitations of certain mail user agents or transports
mean that line lengths should not exceed 75-78 characters. RFC 2822
places a 998-character limit at the absolute maximum but recommends the 78-
character limit (not counting CR/LF, making 80 total), but BrailleNote
just writes lines until terminated by the user (i.e. each paragraph is
given a stream of characters, terminated usually by two CR/LF pairs).
This is causing corruption over here, where my mail transport is sternly
refusing to let me have lines longer than the 998-defined limit (actually,
I think it's a bit more generous than this, but I know the author refuses
to go further for security and compliance reasons - I've asked), instead
forcing a newline wherever it is necessary, normally resulting in lines
and words getting chopped at inoportune moments. Some people here are
using text-based user agents that abide by the 80-25 dimensional display
and so don't much like the wrapping, this is true even for modern
graphical viewers like Mozilla where an option is provided for wrapping
malformed plaintext lines. The other, and far worse issue, is that of
transports which simply trunkate lines beyond the limit. For this reason
I am enquiring whether the wrapping of lines, as per the recommendations
of RFC 2822, has been addressed, as I do feel it sufficiently important.
Previous messages about this problem have visited the list before.
An example of a malformed message can be had by making a BrailleNote send
anything longer than 80 characters in a single paragraph - most messages
on this list. Such messages will not look nice over here and will have
words split by newlines, which my user agent then cleverly reassembles by
substituting the newline/carriage-return with a space (it estimates how
the lines should look, you see). Still perfectly horrible, though, with
split words in the middle of sentences, and non-compliant. It may be that
you will not spot these malformations because your transport doesn't
enforce the limit (most Windows transports and the most modern and up-to-
date UNIX transports, such as Sendmail) - try saving the message as a flat
file and then examining it with a BrailleNote or hex editor, and you'll
see what's happening. It's so-called "Paragraph mode", when it should
really be "Line mode" with a right margin of 78 - 75 is best, allows for
quoting characters.
If you're still not sure what I mean or haven't found the trouble ticket,
feel free to write back and I'll try to be a bit more clear. I wouldn't
know whether this issue has been resolved in 5.1 because I rarely use the
email program, and I can't infer it from the list although I still get
these malformed messages. If you want to see a message as I see it, let
me know and I'll encode one such message using MIME BASE64 encoding and
send it to you - you'll get it without corruption because it was
transported in a flexible encoding that works even with the limit in place
and which all mail programs understand. Incidentally, that's one possible
resolution (though I don't recommend it, because it theoretically narrows
the audience of BrailleNote's email) - you could make BrailleNote encode
the mail before it was sent in a suitable encoding method like
Quoted/Printable, which is also designed to work with the RFC 2822
limitation, if you didn't prefer BrailleNote users to be purist netizens
and wanted the benefit of long lines in email (even Microsoft don't,
Outlook Express wraps by default, though it didn't used to).
Cheers,
Sabahattin
--
Thought for the day:
Intuition (n): an uncanny sixth sense which tells people
that they are right, whether they are or not.
Sabahattin Gucukoglu
Phone: +44 20 7,502-1615
Mobile: +44 7986 053399
http://www.sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/
Email/MSN: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
