Re: Format=Flowed

[Earl Hood <earl@earlhood.com>]

On October 29, 2002 at 03:30, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:

>>   + Added "disableflowed" option to disable the flowed data
>>     conversion.  Data will be converted as regular text/plain.
>
>Just out of curiosity: Why? I mean, if the sender considers the message 
>be best presented when recognizing the flowed format, in which 
>situations does it make sense to disable MHonArc's ability to do so?

There are several, but it depends on the needs of the archive maintainer.
Possible reasons:

  * Bugs in the flowed conversion.  Although we hope to fix them (see
    my upcoming dev post on the status of this), some could still
    exist.

  * The flowed formatting does not render well in text-based clients.
    Since the '>' is lost, you rely on how blockquote and pre are
    handled, which some may consider do not look well in text clients.
    Lynx and links do not render pre inside blockquotes well either
    (they fail to move the left margin, pre always is rendered with
    the left margin at the edge of the window).

    Since I believe there are users concerned with things looking
    okay in text-based browsers, disable flowed conversion may be
    best.

  * Performance.  Although many do not notice any difference,
    flowed conversion has more overhead involved.

I also think it is good to give the user as much control as possible
on how their archives look.

--ewh

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