On Saturday, 27 September 2003 at 0:32:22 -0500, Dan Nelson wrote:
In the last episode (Sep 27), Greg 'groggy' Lehey said:
[Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html]
On Friday, 26 September 2003 at 14:26:38 -0500, Eugene Lee wrote:
On Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 04:48:49AM -0700, Kris Kennaway wrote:
1) Please wrap your lines at 70 characters so your emails may be
easily read
Just curious, is format=flowed disallowed here?
I don't see anything in the standards that defines this format, so I
suppose the answer should be yes. On a more practical basis, I
don't know of any UNIX-based MUA which treats this correctly, and
none of the messages I looked at it had this attribute. In addition,
I can't see how format=flowed can distinguish between computer
output (which should be quoted unchanged, possibly with very long
lines) and text, which RFC 2822 recommends to be 78 characters or
less. It also makes it almost impossible to quote.
So yes, it's disallowed in the sense that it's discouraged, and
that a number of people, myself included, tend to delete such
messages unread. Follow the URL below for more details.
RFC2646 defines format=flowed, and does a pretty good job of explaining
the wrapping, joining, and quoting rules.
Hmm, interesting. I've added it to
http://.lemis.com/email/email-rfc.html. I suppose there are other
places where I should refer to it as well.
The nice thing about correctly-generated format=flowed text is that
it looks just like regular text, so a MUA that doesn't understand
flowed text can still display perfectly readable output. Paragraphs
are wrapped at 72 chars, and a trailing space is added at the wrap
point as a hint that the next line is a logical continuation. Lines
not ending in a space are not flowed, so it's easy to specify what
text will be flowed and what won't.
Yes, if the MUA (and the user) adhere to the conventions. I've taken
a look at the messages I've received recently with format=flowed, and
they're all 80 characters long. That's the intention of the RFC, of
course, but it happens so regularly that I wonder whether my MTA is
reformatting. That doesn't appear to be right, though.
Greg
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