IETF standards should never attempt to solve a technical issue by changing human behavior.
It is futile. And it suggests that the dvelopers are more important than users.
This is a bug in the technology. Fix it.
Sent from my iPad
On Feb 15, 2011, at 13:32, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> * Stuart Cheshire wrote:
>> In the MHonArc mail archive there are often super-long lines, which
>> would be wrapped to the window width when viewing in most mail
>> clients, but when viewed in a web browser they appear as long single
>> lines which take a lot of left-to-right scrolling to read them.
>
> That is the result of some clients and users violating netiquette and
> mail standards, for instance, RFC 1855, section 2.1.1:
>
> - Limit line length to fewer than 65 characters and end a line
> with a carriage return.
>
> and RFC 2822 (and similarily RFC 5322), section 2.1.1:
>
> There are two limits that this standard places on the number of
> characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than
> 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding
> the CRLF.
>
> And this does not cause problems just with unwrapped lines, it also has
> other effects, like people quoting excessively long lines on one line
> but then write their own text properly wrapped (that's appropriate be-
> havior if long lines are rare and most likely intentional, such as when
> including some computer code you don't want wrapped at odd positions.)
>
> I note that one of the main culprits here are Apple Mail users, although
> you seem to be using it yet have managed to send properly wrapped lines.
> If there is something Apple Mail users can do to stop their netiquette
> and standards violations, I would apprciate any pointer you may have.
>
> Obviously the solution is to have those using broken or misconfigured
> clients use clients that are not broken or configure them correctly.
>
> As for the list archives, you can make the lines wrap by changing the
> style sheet (or use an appropriate user style sheet), for instance,
>
> pre { white-space: pre-wrap; }
>
> should probably do it in modern clients (for older clients there is
> option to use proprietary extensions in some browsers, but that may
> not be necessary these days.) This would seem preferable over forcing
> line wraps in the archival software as that would break lines that are
> meant to be long for very good reasons.
> --
> BjÃrn HÃhrmann  mailto:bjoern@xxxxxxxxxxxx  http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
> Am Badedeich 7 Â Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 Â http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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