Fred (FL) wrote:
I notice, every 10th or so Reflector POST, the
sender somehow - posts a "single line" god-awful
long 1-line message? Almost like there are
CR/LF characters missing?
It's basically the consequence of early Windows email programs being
written by people who didn't understand internet email, and then used by
people who had never used email on anything but Windows. The people
generating the problem generally won't see it themselves, because their
email reading software has a complementary fault, so it may be very
difficult to convince them that they are at fault.
In internet plain text email, a long line really is a long line; CR/LF
is carriage return and linefeed, not end of paragraph. However early
Windows email programs simply dumped the output into a Windows textbox
control, or similar (Notepad is basically a wrapper around one), with
the result that CR/LF behaved like a paragraph delimiter. Users who had
never used any other platform thought this feature was "cool", and
didn't think they might be creating email that is difficult for other
people to read.
At the time that the MIME standard, which is the current standard for
email attachments and a pre-requisite for HTML email, was developed, a
format for allowing recognition of paragraph boundaries, and other
simple markup, was defined, but ignored by most Windows email systems.
This expected CR/LF to be used to format the text, but would ignore them
when a suitable viewer viewed the email. I think it used an empty
line as a paragraph delimiter. HTML was eventually misused for the rich
text function.
In fact MIME made things worse, because it removed a weak limit on the
maximum length of a line.
The latest standards based solution to the problem is to use an email
header that indicates that lines ending in space followed by CR/LF have
soft new lines, so that simple email programs will show the original
line breaks and more sophisticated ones can reflow within paragraphs.
Thunderbird does that. Thunderbird does, however, have the problem that
the distinction between soft and hard newlines is not clear when
composing, so someone who learnt that you should press return every 70
or so characters will sometimes put a newline mid-paragraph, which will
not be at the end of the line when the recipient reflows to a different
line length.
Basically, then, the problem arises if the author relied on word
wrapping, but the reading environment obeys the standards more
correctly. In the case of the specific web interfaces to this list, it
may also be that they simply wrapped the text into an HTML "pre"
element, without thinking about a need to wrap - but they are acting
correctly in doing this, even if they didn't consider the need to work
around common erroneous uses.
If you send wrapped text with the Outlook/Exchange combination, it can
wrap the text and insert hard newlines before transferring from the,
proprietary, Exchange, environment, to the internet, but a lot of other
Windows email programs still just output newline at the end of what they
think are paragraphs. Sometimes wrapping before sending is a
configuration option.
--
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.
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