On 25 Apr 2011 at 18:11, Henry Baker wrote:
Unfortunately, I think that this is part of the traditional internet email .. standard.
Apparently, these standards had to cope with Unix/C people who couldn't count past 255, so line lengths are _required_ to be broken up in (apparently) as odd a place as possible.
this is just wrong. You're mixing up a bunch of things here. The *protocol* [which has nothing whatever to do with the actual formatting of the data in the email message] specifies that lines *cannot* be longer than 998 characters. The protocol is a line-at-a-time protocol and they wanted to make it possible for the servers to be able to read the message into a simple, finite buffer. but there's no constraint [other than the above] on the format of the *content* of an email message and so there's no particular reason why URLs need to be "oddly wrapped" [unless they're truly unbelievably long, and that's what tinyurl is for]. Email also accomodates folk who prefer "paragraph at a time", which is "text-flowed"
You will also see from time to time a ">" character inserted before the word "from" if it occurs as the first character of a line. This is because ..."<cr>From" is the _delimiter_ for email!
that's close: it is an anomaly left over from the particular sendmail formatted the so-called "unix format" mailbox. Email, itself, has not such requirements nor constraints, it is only that _some_ mail servers mung messages by sticking in that stupid ">".
But I'd still rather use ascii character based email; "html"/"rich text" email can hide all kinds of non-sense that you don't want to allow.
Do you mes "ascii" for *ANYTHING* else you do? Do you do your calendar, slides, memoranda, documents, reports, IMs, web pages,.... *ANYTHING* in "ascii"? That's a horrible relic of the 70s. And just for the record; HTML is also "just text". Rich text isn't, agreed, and I actually think that of all of the many many 'fancier email' proposals I've seen over the decades, I think that RTF was probably the best of them [an early IEEE proposed-standard used ePS]
Then there is always the O(n^2) growth in delimiters from quoting quotes which also quote quotes. You can see this O(n^2) growth in operation at the end of math-fun emails which have a 4-line terminator at every level of quoting!
[O(n^2) because people tend to quote the _entire_ email each time they reply.]
We agree: that "original message follows" is one of the worst and stupidest conventions to have come down the pike. the doing of Microsoft, I think -- I think they're email client was the first I saw that did that. Let's test -- my email client allows me to compose long lines. So this: http://groups.google.com/group/google-mail-problem-solving-uk/browse_thread/... shouldn't have gotten wrapped. /Bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <--