RE: [topicmaps-comment] Email line-wrapping etiquette

["Seidl, Andy" <Andy.Seidl@Starbase.com>]

Title: RE: [topicmaps-comment] Email line-wrapping etiquette

Hi Murray,

>>I'm guessing you're somewhat new to email?
Not really.  My first "mail" account was on a DEC-10 in 1974
(where we had to manually pull paper tape through a reader to
reboot if we crashed the system--which was not too infrequent).
Though we didn't call it e-mail "way back then". <g>

I'm not suggesting that we all use fancy mail clients.  The only "modern" feature I think its safe to assume is that the client should be able to wrap (or, optionally, not wrap) long lines like this one.  And I agree that white space is important and should be preserved in plain text messages.

        // this function should not be mangled
        // or wrapped by the mail client.
        void noop()
        {
        }

The long line and the function above (or a nicely
indented poem) should both make it through without
damage with any sensible client.

My own preference if for people to hit enter only when they
really
care if there  should be a newline there or not.  In the middle
of
a paragraph, I'd suggest just keep typing.  Otherwise when you
resize
a window narrower than the window the typist was using, you get
ugliness
like this paragraph.

 -- fas

-----Original Message-----
From: Murray Altheim [mailto:murray.altheim@Sun.COM]
Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2001 01:13 AM
To: Seidl, Andy
Cc: topicmaps-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [topicmaps-comment] Email line-wrapping etiquette

> "Seidl, Andy" wrote:
>
> <two-cents-worth>
>
> Of course there's the option of using a more intelligent e-mail client.
> Doing so eliminates the burden of worrying about something that
> people should not be spending brain cycles on; it means that all those
> existing long-lined messages become no problem; and it allows each
> client more flexibility to format messages so they look good on
> *their* device.
>
> It would not really be
> reasonable to expect people
> to enter text like this
> for the benefit of folks
> using a dumb mail client
> on an iPAQ.
>
> Or worse,
> like this
> for web
> phones.
>
> </two-cents-worth>

This isn't a limitation in software, it's a cultural habit.

I'm guessing you're somewhat new to email? Being an old-timer
(maybe 1982?) I've seen many years of emails, all in text format.
Since I'm in the computer sciences, many of these included code
samples, whitespace-formatted tables, and other formatting
created deliberately by their authors (I think more immediately
of Jon Aubrey's carefully-crafted writings). I don't think poets
want their poems reformatted either. Whitespace in email is
significant, the way most people write it (in my experience).

Not everything is a paragraph. If it were, an "intelligent" email
client could handle it. The benefit of email being in text/plain
is that we don't need such "intelligent" software to deal with it.
Given the current state of intelligent email software (eg., MS
Lookout, oops, Outlook) I'll perhaps appear as a Luddite in
wishing the world to remain in text/plain.

If we look back on the history from which "modern" computing displays
have been derived, the 80 column display has been the lingua franca
of the Internet. For email on web phones, there's no good ergonomic
solution for a 14 character wide display other than a scrollpane,
which would be terrible. But I don't think anyone on a cellphone
expects to read things with any formatting, nor do I think anyone
on a laptop or desktop expects to format for 14 character displays.

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim                         <mailto:murray.altheim@sun.com>
XML Technology Center
Sun Microsystems, Inc., MS MPK17-102, 1601 Willow Rd., Menlo Park, CA 94025

      In the evening
      The rice leaves in the garden
      Rustle in the autumn wind
      That blows through my reed hut.  -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu