[vox] Let's Kill the 76 Char Line Limit!

[Jeff Newmiller]

On Fri, 3 Sep 2004, Bill Kendrick wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 01:05:13PM -0800, Edward Elliott wrote:
> > As the old movie, I cant’ take it anymore!! Of the dozens of
> > groups and boards I belong to, LUGOD is the only one that restricts
> > the member to non-wrapping text lines of 76 chars. Of the many
> > technical, professional, healthcare, political, education, etc., this
> > is the only one still forcing these strange restrictions on the
> > members.

[...]

> > Let’s catch up with the rest of the world and forget this archaic
> > and user-unfriendly line restriction policy. It's way 20th century and
> > the group is better than that nonsense.

I am strongly against this proposal.

Since long lines in a plaintext format are a not handled well by all
software (MTA, MUA, or editors), your recipient(s) won't necessarily be
able to understand what you tried to convey.

HTML can handle long lines, primarily by having a semantic definition that
ignores newlines for the most part. Hoever, in my experience, html is a
good medium for web pages, and a poor medium for email... primarily in the
area of quoting and maintenance of context.

Sorry to be a curmudgeon, but interoperability is more important than
your convenience.  If you want a list that supports html email or requires
other specialized MUA software, go there... don't impose it here.

[...]

> Assuming we DO keep the 76-char rule, it would be polite to try and
> list how to re-wrap a message before sending, using various clients/editors.

In Outlook, manually.  I hate Outlook... I hate Outlook... I hate
Outlook....

In Pine, Ctrl-J will work for zero or one level of quotation.  Beyond
that, you are on your own.

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