Re: Clean North members news

[Dan Brosemer <odin@svartalfheim.net>]

On Mon, May 27, 2002 at 05:10:49PM +0000, Don McGorman wrote:
> I'm not going to argue but the newsletter I received at Yahoo had very 
> strange formatting and was definitely hard to read.  You can say it's my 
> fault but bottom line, this problem, if widespread, will tend to turn off 
> readers.

Not your fault, but Yahoo's, I believe.

The message was _perfectly_ formatted according to RFC 2822, and even (the
more restrictive) 822.  The general internet rule is "be conservative in
what you send, and liberal in what you receive", that was a _very_
conservative message in terms of formatting, and any non-broken email reader
should have rendered it just fine.

> I was not trying to be 'critical'; I just wanted to alert Kathie to a 
> potential problem.  It would be a shame for her effort creating the e-news 
> be wasted by technological barriers.

Fair enough.  See section 2.1.1 of RFC2822:
http://www.faqs.org/rfc/rfc2822.txt

Specifically: "The more conservative 78 character recommendation is to
accommodate the many implementations of user interfaces that display these
messages which may truncate, or disastrously wrap, the display of more than
78 characters per line, in spite of the fact that such implementations are
non-conformant to the intent of this specification (and that of [RFC2821] if
they actually cause information to be lost)."

It seems that Yahoo is wrapping at under 78 characters.  I can't imagine
why, however, there is no other reasonable explanation.  The onus is on them
to fix that, or, if it's simply because you made your browser window too
small, the onus is on you to enlarge your browser window, simply because
that behavior is broken according to the standard for internet text
messages.  We can't arbitrarily decide to start wrapping at, say, 60
characters in hopes that yahoo will treat it better, and then find out that
some other broken email reader wants 58... we just have to make messages as
that follow the standard as conservatively as possible.  I believe that has
been done.

The longest line is 77 characters: under the 78 character recommended limit,
and _well_ under the 998 character _imposed_ limit.

> So you don't like my use of quotes; in 'plain text' mode that is the only 
> way I know of to accent words and phrases apart from using UPPERCASE (which 
> I am told is the eqivalent of SHOUTING).  Maybe you have a suggestion?

Oh, using > is quite valid (and, indeed, the preferred way) of quoting.  You
missed my point.

Quoting text is considered a promise to reply below the quoted text to what
was said.

If you go look at the message you sent on May 25:
http://lists.cleannorth.org/archive/techies/2002-05/msg00017.html

You'll see that all the quoted text is below new content, and the new
content accounts for about 6.5% of the length of the message.  There is
absolutely no reason that 204 lines of a message we already have in the list
archives:
http://lists.cleannorth.org/archive/members/2002-05/msg00000.html
needs to be quoted almost in its entirety.  Especially when no one part is
commented on, explicitly.

But in answer to your shouting question, yes, all caps is considered
yelling.  You have other ways to stress a word, though.  _underlining_,
/italics/, and *bold* are just a few.

-Dan

-- 
"Burnished gallows set with red
 Caress the fevered, empty mind
 Of man who hangs bloodied and blind
 To reach for wisdom, not for bread."  -- Deoridhe Grimsdaughter