On Thursday, September 29, 2011 03:36:26 pm Nicholas Weaver wrote: > Word wrapping MUST be done on the recipient side, not on the sender side, > unless you want to maintain ridiculous conventions like "text lines are at > most 72 characters, monospaced" which were obsolete two decades ago. > > And in this case particular case, blame Microsoft. > > Apple on their mailer for the longest time implemented a standard method, > format=flowed, intended to please BOTH mail readers that can word-wrap and > mail readers that can't. But they dropped this way back in 10.6.2, > because Microsoft never recognized it right. > > Given the choice between pleasing a few recipients who cling to an obsolete > convention with obsolete tools and pleasing the very large population of > recipients with a tool unwilling to accept a standard which could please > both, Apple went with the natural choice: it is the mail reader's > responsibility to word wrap to the reader's own display parameters.
format=flowed gave the nec'y hint, told my user agent that the text was meant to be wrapped. in the absence of this hint, i don't get word wrapping because the columns might be fixed. (like code fragments or similar.) so i do blame microsoft for not doing the right thing with format=flowed, but i also blame apple for going off-rails and violating the principle of least astonishment for an unknown but nonshrinking population of non-microsoft e-mail readers. _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
