On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 1:26 PM, Paul Vixie <[email protected]> wrote: > format=flowed is now considered as the implicit default by some readers > notably apple's Mail.app, because so many senders use the format without > saying so in their mime headers. MH needs to adapt to current conditions.
I have reservations about that. I have a pet peeve of MUAs not providing the proper headers, and I blame Microsoft for this historically bad behavior that has lead others to replicate this bad behavior. Before format=flowed existed, you had MUAs auto-wrapping text for text/plain message and rendering things in non-fixed width fonts. Hence, it is hard to say if what is being seen now is just a continuation of this, or if the underlying data is truly format=flowed, but not labeled as such. > this probably means some heuristic where if the text looks like nonwrapped > paragraphs then format=flowed is presumed, unless some CLI option overrides > this. for example, a new show -autowrap / -noautowrap option defaulting > to -noautowrap if !isatty(STDOUT_FILENO) and to -autowrap otherwise. I think any such heuristic should be disabled by default. nmh users are not your typical email user. I do not like software that formats messages in a matter that is different from what MIME headers indicate w/o my explicit knowledge. In the example you cite, I would have -noautowrap always be the default. Of course, if the MIME content-type header does state format=flowed, then auto-wrapping should occur as defined by the format=flowed spec. For cases when output is redirected to a non-tty device, you may need an option that allows one to specify the max column count so nmh would know what the wrap boundary is. --ewh _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
