On 2012-11-20, John Long <codeb...@inbox.lv> wrote: > > I use slrn, probably the best all around news reader out there and > it doesn't wrap unless you tell it. But even that looks bad.
slrn's problem. Slrn (which I sometimes use as well) should do better. > You can't make a sloppy pile of HTML or run-on sentences look like a > newsgroup post or an acceptable email. Actually it's trivial to wrap text that is unwrapped, and to do so in a way that meets each users preference. A news reader can simply add a linefeed in place of the last space before the user-specifically-preferred line length. But the opposite is not true. You cannot take narrowly wrapped text and unwrap it and rewrap it, because you could end up removing linefeeds from a peom, or something meant to have line breaks at precise places. So technically you can please all readers by not line wrapping at all. > There are standards and there is such a thing as common decency, > even if it's less common than it was. s/standards/conventions/. If you mean to say standards, is this an ISO standard? Conventions are good, but only when they cater to those with *good* tools. When a convention caters to compensate for poorly designed tools, and then cause difficultly for others with good tools, the convention should be challenged, IMO.
