Re: How to display format=flowed (and other topics)?
* Thomas Zehetbauer <thomasz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2005-10-13 17:14]:
> On 2005-10-12 | 19:35:19, Thomas Roessler wrote:
> >I'm sorry, but that argument goes too short. format=flowed tells us
> >that the author is happy about having their text re-flowed. It also
> >makes it easier to re-flow text. But why does that mean that we
> >*have* to reflow it, instead of making the best use of that
> >information to make messages as readable as possible?
>
> AFAIK that is not part of the standard but neither is to rewrap messages
> that do not fit within the terminals display. It is not the scope of the
> standard to tell e-mail applications how to behave.
So the current Mutt behaviour is not a bug.
> >Wrong. People read e-mail on PDAs and mobile phones (with 40 or
> >less columns -- i.e., line lengths that are far below the kind of
> >formatting that you would want senders to inflict on "ordinary"
> >readers), and format=flowed comes in very handy there.
>
> If everyone is happy with at most 80 columns, why are displays and
> resolutions growing bigger and bigger?
In order to tile more and more XTerms onto one display, of course :-)
Using high resolutions makes sense for various things, but not for
creating much too long lines of single-column text.
Of course, I do get the point that nobody would be hurt if producing
much too long lines was optional; and personally I wouldn't really care,
since such an option probably won't blow up the code. But I don't agree
that refusing to add such an option means imposing an _arbitrary_ limit.
The fact that increasing line lengths to considerably more than 80
characters decreases readability is not a question of personal
preference. And the fact that Outlook and others don't care about
readability does in no way prove that it doesn't make sense to do so;
it's just yet another reason not to use them.
Holger
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