[Mailman-Users] line returns missing

[Mark Sapiro]

Bill Christensen wrote:
>
>I've seen the same happen in the archives. For instance, this 
>original message is not wrapped:
>
><http://pec4u.org/pipermail/watchdogs/2008-July/000763.html>
>
>but this reply to it wraps the quoted text from the first just fine:
>
><http://pec4u.org/pipermail/watchdogs/2008-July/000764.html>
>
>(both of these display properly wrapped in my Eudora/Mac)
>
>It appears that a fair number of pipermail archived posts aren't 
>wrapped. Any way to keep that from happening?


This is a pipermail issue. It is somewhat distinct from the issue in
the OP. Here's the story.

Some MUAs compose messages in "word processer" paragraph form and send
them either with long lines or with encoded lines that decode into
long lines. As noted earlier in this thread, the viewer's MUA
generally wraps these long lines to the window width.

Pipermail, however, creates the archive page by wrapping the message
text with <pre> ... </pre> tags to preserve the original formatting of
the text. If it didn't do that, normally formatted text and things like

Col 1     Col 2     Col 3    ...

xx        yy        zz
aaa       bbbb      c

would all be run together on the displayed archive page like this.

If it didn't do that, normally formatted text and things like Col 1 Col
2 Col 3 ... xx yy zz aaa bbbb c would all be run together on the
displayed archive page like this.

The problem is that the <pre> tag causes the browser to display the
long line as a long line without wrapping it to window width.

This is a dificult problem to solve. One could remove the <pre> ...
</pre> wrapper and replace every newline in the text with <br>. That
would work for text, but tabular data as above would still be
compressed on the individual lines. For tabular data, you would need
to expand tab characters if any and replace spaces with &nbsp;
entities, but you can't replace all spaces with &nbsp; entities or
you'd be back to the original problem. Combine that with the fact that
Pipermail is a can of worms that no one wants to touch, and you're
stuck with what you've got.

The answer should be to get everyone to use an MUA that creates flowed
text per RFC 3676 for 'paragraphs', but good luck on that one.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan