[Mailman-Users] Carriage Return in Archives

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 15 Nov 2002 14:22:25 -0500 
John DeCarlo <jdecarlo at mitre.org> wrote:

> Hello, Just wanted to make the point that MUAs should *not* put in
> line breaks except for new paragraphs.  Any decent MUA that is reading
> the message will perform the line wraps for you based on the size of
> your window.

Wrong.

  1) Not everybody uses a windowing interface.

  2) Not all text is prose

  3) Not all text can be reflowed without losing data.

> It is really a kludge to force the sender to put in line breaks every
> 72 characters.

Nope.  This argument was fought and quite properly lost almost 20 years
ago.

> And, as Susan pointed out, most MUAs will wrap for you.  Thus, how do
> you get the web view of the archive to do the wrapping?  It doesn't
> have to change the content of the message, just the display.

You don't unless you wedge-fit hack onto your system in order to cover
up other's broken software.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.