[mdlug] List archive and long lines

[Aaron Kulkis]

Wolfger wrote:
> 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

Webmail is great if you like waiting all day for 80k of HTML to read
a 2k message...which could have been downloaded already in one giant
grab, along with all the others, while still reading the first message.

Even in the comfort of home, I don't have that kind of time to
waste.  Here in Baghdad, some days, I'm lucky to read my mail
at all.

For a while, i had all of my mail forwarded to yahoo...

My experience wit that was that I read oh...maybe 10 emails/day.

And dealing with spam on webmail... ARGH.  I'm getting about 2 MB
of spam every day....somewhere around 300+  I definitely don't have
time to play html-clicky-reload-clicky-reload-clicky all day with
both the incoming box AND also the spam box (false positive spam
identification is far too frequent).




> 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.