In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, fantasai
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Joe Francis wrote:
> > Mail Compose is used much more by NS6 and mozilla users, so we
> > concentrated on getting the behavior right for these folks. These folks
> > expect a single return press to correspond to a single new line. They
> > also expect to be able to click on any empty line and begin typing
> > there. Neither of these goals are compatible with using paragraphs by
> > default.
>
> The only obstacle here is your default stylesheet.
> Supposing you put this in a <style> element for every new document:
>
> p {
> text-indent: 2em;
> margin: 0;
> }
>
> A single return press corresponds to a new line, only it's indented
> to indicate a paragraph--which in the vast majority of cases, it is.
> There are no "empty lines" for users to click on and begin typing.
> Shift-return inserts a soft break (<br>).
Don't think that we didn't consider options like this in the early
days. We would have loved to have used this solution from the
beginning, but it suffers from the problem that CSS-impaired user
agents will still display the paragraphs with space between them. And
despite other protestations on this thread that HTML is never supposed
to specify the exact details of layout, we thought it an important
issue that the composer of a message would see no space between
paragraphs, but the receiver would. The addition of inter-paragraph
space could alter the meaning of the message in ways that we can and
cannot anticipate.
In addition, consider the (not insubstantial) set of people who insist
on writing HTML emails as if they were plain text, by hitting return at
the end of each line. On a non-CSS-savvy user reading agent, those
emails would all look double spaced. Bingo, we've just made that person
look like a real luser.
Simon
--
Simon Fraser Entomologist
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://people.netscape.com/sfraser/
