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List:       sylpheed
Subject:    [sylpheed:22161] Re: PATCH: Show underlying URL before
From:       Mark Smith <sylpheed () ecd454c569bd3359dd78788d1c15ea30 ! nosense ! org>
Date:       2003-12-29 1:30:00
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I must admit I've been confused about this wrap/no-wrap issue in email clients. Sometimes I've had the \
issue with long emails, but most of the time not. I've also used a number of email clients over the years \
(elm, pine, eudora, outlook, netscape, evolution, sylpheed) so I've never been sure if the problem was at \
the sender side, or the receiver side.

Although it might be convenient for some recipients, I don't think wrapping at 72 to 76 characters is \
very useful to a growing number of people, who

(a) have much bigger screens (which is starting to be most of us), where wrapping at 72 to 76 characters \
becomes a waste of screen real estate, if the chosen email viewing window size is large, or full screen

(b) have much smaller screens eg on PDAs, with a possible displayable line length much smaller than 70 \
characters, where wrapping at 72 to 76 characters puts ugly breaks at random places in the text, making \
it harder to read

I don't feel it is right to make an assumption of the size, or what type of device an email is going to \
be viewed on, at the sending side.

It would be interesting to know if people who are blind have issues with the wrapped lines - I could \
guess their text to speech readers might pause at carrage returns, to indicate pauses in the text. Having \
it pause at the end of every "line", mid-sentence would probably get very annoying very quickly.

I don't know what position the email RFCs take on this issue, my observation is that usually the IETF \
don't build assumptions into the standards that may not be true in the future. I would think that \
assuming display device size would be something that hasn't been assumed in the email RFCs.

As a related observation, the text at the URL posted had to be doctored via HTML to get it to expand \
outside of the browser window - indicating that HTML was intended to adapt to the device displaying it.

Regards,
Mark.

On Sun, 28 Dec 2003 17:19:20 +0100
Godwin Stewart <gstewart@bonivet.net> wrote:

> Sun, 28 Dec 2003 17:05:34 +0100 scripsit Georg Klein:
> 
> > But it is not a question of the mailer - to wrap long lines is a help to
> > keep mails readable - that's all i wanted to tell you.
> 
> http://linux.sgms-centre.com/misc/netiquette.php
> 
> -- 
> G. Stewart   --   gstewart@bonivet.net -- gstewart@spamcop.net
> Registered Linux user #284683 (Slackware 9.0, Linux 2.4.23)
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> root@mybox:~# rm -Rf /bin/laden


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