Lo, on Saturday, May 18, Hans Ekbrand did write: > On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 03:40:47PM -0700, Vineet Kumar wrote:
> > The reason most people suggest 72 is that traditionally, terminals > > are 80 characters wide, and 72 leaves enough room to be quoted with > > "> " four times. That's one of the reasons I like VM and Gnus. They run in (X)Emacs, and fill-paragraph-or-region (M-q) is almost always smart enough to get the quoting brackets right when it refills a paragraph. > Although I actually have a terminal (can't say I use it much though), > I sometimes wonder if email conventions should be derived from > limitations of such ancient hardware. In some sense, its a good > practice to require as little as possible from the clients, but is > 80x25 a limit that anyone is facing anymore? Yes. My primary computer is in the shop, so I'm reduced to reading mail on my firewall. As it's a firewall with limited disk space and so forth, I don't have X installed. Thus, 80x25. Plus, if I'm in a hurry, or over a slow network connection, I like to be able to read my mail with /usr/bin/less. The preponderance of quoted-printable and base-64 and HTML, never mind long lines, makes this difficult---IMO, for no real gain. (Binary attachments are another story, obviously.) > So, a better argument for wrapping lines at 72 chars would perhaps be > that it make the text easier to read (even if you have real screen > estate that could handle a lot more). True; it's long been understood in the professional typesetting community that lines which are too long are difficult to read. I've even seen discussions of what `too long' means---I think it's a function of how long the font's em-space is, but I don't remember the details off the top of my head. (Add this to the fact that most on-screen computer fonts, IMO, don't have enough leading, and you've got serious legibility problems.) Richard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]