[mdlug] List archive and long lines

[Wolfger]

On 1/11/07, Raymond McLaughlin <driveray at ameritech.net> wrote:
> There has been some discussion on the list about the readability of
> posts generated by mail clients that do not insert hard line breaks.
>
> It is argued that modern readers should intelligently wrap text to fit
> the screen that is displaying it. This sounds good in principle, but I'm
> not convinced that this can always be done with fidelity to the writers
> intentions.

Well... if the writer's intention is to do ASCII art, then no.
Otherwise, I don't see why not.

> The question is complicated because some people have pop/imap mail and
> read their email with real mail clients, while others have web mail and
> read their mail in a browser. And further complicating this is the
> matter of the list archives.

I don't really see how that complicates things. I've never seen a
webmail (unreal?) client that didn't auto-wrap the lines.

> I'm reasonably confident that most modern mail clients do, or can be
> configured to, display most messages in a readable fashion.

That is my experience.

> I don't (yet) subscribe with a web-mail address so I can't comment on
> this directly.

Well, the interesting thing I just learned (through the archive) is
that my messages are some of the "offending" ones, that scroll off the
screen. When I think about it, that's not really surprising, as
webmail developers have no idea whether the user will be on a 20 inch
wide-screen LCD at some ridiculously high dpi, or on a cell phone.
They don't want to adopt an arbitrary standard for line length. It
really makes sense. Proponents of a standardized line length are
simply not keeping up with the times.

> The problem with the web archives is pretty bad when long lines are
> present. Having to side scroll to read something really sucks!

Yes! Fortunately, there's ways around that. Webmail, for one (my
archives of MDLUG are on Google's servers... I have a searchable
archive at my fingertips, with long lines formatted to my current
screen, on any computer with internet access. Another solution is to
copy/paste to a text editor that does line wraps. Another solution is
what you implemented here. It looks good to me.


-- 
Wolfger
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