From: Claus André Färber (usenet-format-list@faerber.muc.de)
Date: Mon Apr 20 1998 - 05:20:00 CDT
Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> schrieb:
> In <1d7mx7l.1q2s0m57tu0gnM@roxboro0-039.dyn.interpath.net>
> phenix@interpath.com (John Moreno) writes:
>
> >Well, since Pete just pointed out that it was to leave room for CRLF
> >(which I feel stupid for overlooking) the point is moot. We should also
> >use 78.
>
> But, as other have pointed out, the argument is pretty specious.
>
> Can I just remind everybody what our current draft actually says.
>
> 1. Keep within 72
> 2. If you really cannot manage that, keep within 79
> 3. If you really really cannot manage that, then keep within 998
That's not exact enough:
A 1. Keep the _text_ within 72 characters when writing new text.
2. If you can't manage that, keep the text within 79 chars.
3. If you can't even manage that, i.e. because of multiple quote
levels, make it as short as possible or reformat.
B. Keep the whole thing within 998 octets after encoding.
Note that (A) is the text in characters BEFORE encoding and a political
limit on the content, i.e. does not apply if you're sending images etc.,
whereas (B) is a technical limit on the article format, which applies
after the character set (UTF-8 etc.) and content transfer encoding
(quoted-printable, base64).
What we must discourage is something like this, which I've seen with
quoted-printable encoding.
--- cut here --->
> >Well, since Pete just pointed out that it was to leave room for CRLF
> >(which I feel stupid for overlooking) the point is moot. We should =
also
> >use 78.
<--- cut here ---
Either reformat the text (i.e. put the "also" in the next line after the
quote marks and before the "use 78") or just keep it as it is.
-- Claus Andre Faerber <http://www.muc.de/~cfaerber/> Fax: +49_8061_3361 PGP: ID=1024/527CADCD FP=12 20 49 F3 E1 04 9E 9E 25 56 69 A5 C6 A0 C9 DC