On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 05:43:41PM -0400, John Hawkinson wrote:
Very long lines -- one line per paragraph -- changes the meaning of
ASCII/Unicode.
err, what? I am confused what we are discussing.
ASCII was not designed to be automatically word-wrapped. The idea was
that a line keeps going off to the right until a CR character.
Microsoft and Apple decided long ago to do something different, and
effectively change the definition of the character set a little.
I think it was associated with the move to GUIs, and many windows of
widely varying sizes, including text dialog boxes. It was a real
problem, of course -- as we see now, fixed-length lines don't really
work when displayed at varying width. One line per paragraph and
automatic word-wrap is a fairly simple solution, and works pretty
well, but it's a redefinition, and incompatible.
I could live with that if it were labelled, with a new MIME subtype, but I
agree that a new subtype probably
And even more so here.
There could be a new subtype of text, maybe text/paragraph, to label
body parts that should be interpreted that way. Apparently something
like that was proposed about 20 years ago, but it didn't happen.
