On 2012-11-20, Rado Q <l%...@gmx.de> wrote: >=- David Young wrote on Tue 20.Nov'12 at 11:59:55 -0600 -= > >> "What, you have computers in your pockets but there is no >> conformance to the width in columns of 40 year-old data terminals >> any more?" > > That's not a technical issue but readability: it's easier on the > eyes/ flow of reading when you don't have to jump big distances when > CR-LF.
It's both. There is a reability issue, and a technical solution. 72 characters is easy on the eyes if you have an 80+ character wide display, but try that on a smartphone. It's senseless to impose a convention that assumes that the consumer of the information will have particular limitations. > Right, then have software _produce_ humanly useful results in the > 1st place rather than trying to catchup something already gone > wrong. I'm tired of "fix/workaround what others are failing to > comply". The software that composes a post knows *less* about the software that will render it than the software that will render it. Some will read on their phone, some on a laptop, e-reader, and one day many will be reading the text on their walls. There's no sense in an author trying to guess who will read it and on what medium. >> Software could digest a lot of this email that doesn't conform to >> my taste, priorities, available time, attention, perceptual >> strengths and weaknesses, and spit out something that's not only >> more palatable but more useful, but software doesn't do that. > > Software can't do magic, or make up for human failures. But this is precisely what you're calling for when imposing a 72 character limit. The software for composition cannot possibly know who will read it on what other software. So the best you can do is compose with no linefeeds, except when a linebreak is really needed (a peom, for example). The the rendering software can wrap where it makes the most sense to, and honor the existing linefeeds that are important. The rendering tool cannot know a important (peom) linefeed apart from the linefeeds of a composer who tried to guess what the reader would prefer.
