Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2003 00:32:22 -0500 From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com> To: "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Message format *again* (was: Why mplayer in FreeBSD 5.1 behave not so good as Debian in my computer?) Message-ID: <20030927053222.GC57218@dan.emsphone.com> In-Reply-To: <20030927021722.GF16008@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20030926080458.8D277349379@sjtu.edu.cn> <20030926114849.GA70496@rot13.obsecurity.org> <20030926192638.GJ9910@localhost.Earthlink.net> <20030927021722.GF16008@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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In the last episode (Sep 27), Greg 'groggy' Lehey said: > [Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html] > On Friday, 26 September 2003 at 14:26:38 -0500, Eugene Lee wrote: > > On Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 04:48:49AM -0700, Kris Kennaway wrote: > >> > >> 1) Please wrap your lines at 70 characters so your emails may be > >> easily read > > > > Just curious, is "format=flowed" disallowed here? > > I don't see anything in the standards that defines this format, so I > suppose the answer should be "yes". On a more practical basis, I > don't know of any UNIX-based MUA which treats this correctly, and > none of the messages I looked at it had this attribute. In addition, > I can't see how "format=flowed" can distinguish between computer > output (which should be quoted unchanged, possibly with very long > lines) and text, which RFC 2822 recommends to be 78 characters or > less. It also makes it almost impossible to quote. > > So yes, it's "disallowed" in the sense that it's discouraged, and > that a number of people, myself included, tend to delete such > messages unread. Follow the URL below for more details. RFC2646 defines format=flowed, and does a pretty good job of explaining the wrapping, joining, and quoting rules. The nice thing about correctly-generated format=flowed text is that it looks just like regular text, so a MUA that doesn't understand flowed text can still display perfectly readable output. Paragraphs are wrapped at 72 chars, and a trailing space is added at the wrap point as a hint that the next line is a logical continuation. Lines not ending in a space are not flowed, so it's easy to specify what text will be flowed and what won't. I'd use it myself if I can ever get around to hacking joe's paragraph-reformat function to add the trailing spaces.. -- Dan Nelson dnelson@allantgroup.com
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