On Sep 3, 2010, at 1:55 PM, david parsons wrote:
78 character line length is an artifact of ttys traditionally being
80 columns wide, as well as an artifact of the annoying habit of
some ttys to force a newline if you write a character into the last
cell on the screen.
According to Ken Spreitzer at Tiger Technologies, word wrap is not
just an artifact:
Actually, the official Internet email specifications ("RFC"s) still
require outgoing messages to be broken. Please see this page for an
interesting discussion of this:
http://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html
The above URL provides links to the relevant RFCs. Below is a larger
portion of my conversation with Ken, which began with a question about
a webmail program called Mailman:
Thomas:
Regarding word wrap in Mailman -- I like email messages without a
hard wrap (at, say 70 characters per line). This limit is no longer
necessary, is it? I'm trying out Mailman and I like everything about
it except this. (Plain text -- yeehah!)
Ken:
Mailman doesn't change the word wrap on any message it distributes.
Your mail program (Apple Mail) is sending out messages with lines
wrapped at 70 characters. This is actually the way that email is
supposed to be done, and the receiving mail program should then re-
flow the text so that it doesn't look like it was word-wrapped. What
mail program was being used to view the received mailing list message?
Thomas:
I'm afraid that is outdated info. I have verified that Apple Mail is
not inserting wraps.
That email is _supposed_ to contain wraps is, AFAIK, an old
convention that evolved because of server and/or software
limitations, limitations that no longer exist. Remember when you
could only attach one file per message? Similar case.
Ken:
Actually, the official Internet email specifications ("RFC"s) still
require outgoing messages to be broken. Please see this page for an
interesting discussion of this:
http://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html
What's happening in this case is that Apple Mail is doing something
a little smarter than the average mail program. It's fully
compliant, but not every other mail program out there supports it.
Basically, Apple Mail adds a "format-flowed" to the Content-Type
mail header. This acts as a hint that the receiving mail program can
remove the line breaks and re-flow each block of lines into a word-
wrapped paragraph. This is a standard, but not every mail program
supports it when displaying messages. Apple Mail does, of course,
which is why it probably looks like the paragraph isn't broken up
when you view a message in Apple Mail.
You can easily see this in practice. Send yourself a test message
using Apple Mail. Then view the received message's raw source (View
Message Raw Source). You'll see that the received message has been
split into multiple lines.
So this is all standards-compliant. The other thing to mention is
that the version of Mailman we're using does not pass that
"format=flowed" header through. A later version of Mailman does pass
it through, which would definitely help with your problem, but we
don't have any specific plan for when we will be installing the
newer version.
I hope the above is helpful regarding this Markdown-dev question.
- Thomas
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