Marc Glad you asked!
>The '>' was a discovery of mine, and i did put that discovery in a J forum >(chat) which you, and many folks, may not be subscribed to. So i will quote >the lead of the first post below for reference. Not all for it is a loong >thread. The rest can be browsed in Nabble, though i prefer to keep history >formatted in my own mail archive. As t is to me faster and less confusing. >i do hope others will adopt this end run around browsers obfuscation of ones >plain text submissions. >a mail user agent (MUA) sees a line beginning with > as not needing its >services as a formatter. So by prefixing paragraphs, or long lines, with that >they will make it through MUAs gauntlet unscathed. It is a way of getting to >the writers true intentions - rather than a machines interpretations of such. greg ~krsnadas.org -- from: Marc Simpson <[email protected]> via forums.jsoftware.com to: [email protected] date: 14 May 2013 07:31 subject: Re: [Jprogramming] Testing consecutive pairs of primes Somewhat off topic: >Greg, I find reading your posts here quite confusing as you seem to use a >leading ">" (typically indicating quoted text) as a bullet. It's possible that >some folks are skimming over these paragraphs accidentally. Best, M -- from: greg heil <[email protected]> to: Chat forum <[email protected]> date: 29 March 2013 12:56 subject: Re: [Jbeta] [Jchat] mailing browser > Many have made interesting suggestions to which mail users have been long > plagued: the breaking up of long lines by MUAs and its devastating side > effect on meaning. Presumably what the authors of those MUAs hope is that > thereby they can lock folks into their proprietary "solution" >i recently made a discovery which seems to be a workaround this problem for >most environments and most MUAs. To wit if one precedes a line with a ">" it >will not be wrapped! At least not on my gMail MUA. Others can see the effect >on theirs (most of this preserved thread has been so treated and can serve as >a test case) >Thus the prescription would be to precede any long line which should be >preserved with paragraph wrapping, rather than breakup, with a >. >On a side note Google began pushing yesterday another revision of their gMail >MUA. There are some benefits, but unfortunately it has a major killer (at >least for me) in that it does not allow the creation of text-only posts. All >posts must be in their rich-text format and suffer the overhead of being >duplicated in a text only form. >i am attempting to use Thunderbird as a MUA, but it has serious inherent >deficits in using webmail data: all that data needs be replicated. This is no >small task and is not suitable for a small machine or limited bandwidth. >If anyone can suggest another MUA which gets around this problem, perhaps by >being extensible i am all ears. greg ~krsnadas.org ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
