IETF standards should never attempt to solve a technical issue by changing human behavior.
It is futile. And it suggests that the dvelopers are more important than users. This is a bug in the technology. Fix it. Sent from my iPad On Feb 15, 2011, at 13:32, Bjoern Hoehrmann <[email protected]> wrote: > * Stuart Cheshire wrote: >> In the MHonArc mail archive there are often super-long lines, which >> would be wrapped to the window width when viewing in most mail >> clients, but when viewed in a web browser they appear as long single >> lines which take a lot of left-to-right scrolling to read them. > > That is the result of some clients and users violating netiquette and > mail standards, for instance, RFC 1855, section 2.1.1: > > - Limit line length to fewer than 65 characters and end a line > with a carriage return. > > and RFC 2822 (and similarily RFC 5322), section 2.1.1: > > There are two limits that this standard places on the number of > characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than > 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding > the CRLF. > > And this does not cause problems just with unwrapped lines, it also has > other effects, like people quoting excessively long lines on one line > but then write their own text properly wrapped (that's appropriate be- > havior if long lines are rare and most likely intentional, such as when > including some computer code you don't want wrapped at odd positions.) > > I note that one of the main culprits here are Apple Mail users, although > you seem to be using it yet have managed to send properly wrapped lines. > If there is something Apple Mail users can do to stop their netiquette > and standards violations, I would apprciate any pointer you may have. > > Obviously the solution is to have those using broken or misconfigured > clients use clients that are not broken or configure them correctly. > > As for the list archives, you can make the lines wrap by changing the > style sheet (or use an appropriate user style sheet), for instance, > > pre { white-space: pre-wrap; } > > should probably do it in modern clients (for older clients there is > option to use proprietary extensions in some browsers, but that may > not be necessary these days.) This would seem preferable over forcing > line wraps in the archival software as that would break lines that are > meant to be long for very good reasons. > -- > Björn Höhrmann · mailto:[email protected] · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de > Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de > 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/ > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > [email protected] > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
