Greetings, On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 03:48:18PM +0000, Peter Lewis wrote:
> Absolutely, as you quite rightly say, 30 or so years ago. But nowadays the > terminal is _one way_ of reading email. There are now others, and in my very > humble opinion, cultural conventions should always be able to be updated to > move with the way people actually use things. But, you are using email system that is 30 or so years old. All email message format (RFC822 AFAIR), SMTP, POP3/IMAP, mbox/Maildir, MIME, Base64/Quoted-Printable -- nearly everything of this is for old 30-40 years old systems. You are using it -- you can not change any rules, protocols, formats and specifications. If you will -- you will get the very different system, of course that can work quite good with unlimited lines. > This is of course valid, though the client could detect the size of the > terminal and wrap accordingly, no (assuming there was also an option to > disable it)? Why not to do it reversely? If no postprocessing to 72-formated message is applied -- it will be ideally shown on all terminals. If you have got Web-interface, cellphone or netbook -- you can switch some kind of postprocessing on to trim all newlines and do whatever you want. Why should increadible amount of an old-style email writers switch to something? Why not just to format your message 72-chars per line and everyone will be happy? :-) > This is probably the best argument, i.e. if what is being sent is code, a > patch or something which isn't natural language where line breaks have other > meanings... but couldn't (shouldn't?) these go in attachments anyway? Why should we change email to look like Web? It is very different fully undependent systems. -- Happy hacking, Sergey Matveev () ASCII Ribbon Campaign FSF Associate member #5968 | FSFE Fellow #1390 /\ Keep it simple! _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
