[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> On Fri, 16 Feb 2001, Kevin D. Clark wrote:
> > What does your mail program do when it sees this?:
> >
> > A damsel with a dulcimer / In a vision once I saw: / It was an Abyssinian
> > maid, / And on her dulcimer she played, / Singing of Mount Abora. / Could
> > I revive within me / Her symphony and song,
>
> It broke the line on spaces, presenting a wrapped paragraph, begining with a
> single right-angle-bracket (>), and colored the entire paragraph with the
> color I have configured for first-level quoted text.
That's very reasonable.
My bias is that I came from the era when mailers that handled color
were virtually non-existent, so I don't go for colors much. But I
don't deny that this sounds like a reasonable scheme.
> When I replied, it maintained the original line as a single line, wider than
> 80 columns. I then used the [CTRL]+[J] command to wrap it, which handled the
> quote leader (>) for me.
Excellent.
[snip]
> > If "yes", great, but what if I send you an ASCII picture that gets wrapped
> > by PINE, thus rendering it unusable?
>
> If you send me an ASCII picture wider than my terminal, it is going to look
> crappy, regardless.
>
> If I then widen by terminal window, Pine "unwraps" the text as the window
> gets wider, allowing me to view the picture as intended.
Excellent. My mailer does this too.
> If I instead save the message to a file, the original message is preserved,
> formatting (or lack thereof) intact. I could then use something like "less
> -S" to try and scroll-and-view the picture.
Excellent.
> > I'm a member of the "try not to send email with lines >79 characters"
>
> I agree, but I also agree with the "Be generous in what you accept, and
> strict in what you produce" theory of operation.
This is pretty much my point of view. Although my generosity has
limits...
> > ... and the "mailers shouldn't touch the contents of email messages"
>
> Pine is not modifying the contents of the message; it is handling
> presentation of the message intelligently. This is an important
> distrinction.
Absolutely.
> Any mailer more advanced than /bin/mail (which simply spews to stdout) handles
> presentation. Paging, MIME decoding, multiple character sets, HTML mail,
> etc., all require the rendering agent to do some processing. Certainly XEmacs
> does! :-)
Yup, my mailer certainly handles all of that.
So, it sounds like Pine is a decent email program. I think that my
mailer is decent too. So I think that we agree.
Certainly we've both seen lots of mailers that have a poorer set of
features.
Mmm. It's almost beer-o-clock! (-:
--kevin
--
Kevin D. Clark (cetaceannetworks.com!kclark) | Will hack Perl for
Cetacean Networks, Inc. | fine food, good beer,
Portsmouth, N.H. (USA) | or fun.
alumni.unh.edu!kclark (PGP Key Available) |
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