From: John Moreno (phenix@interpath.com)
Date: Mon Apr 20 1998 - 10:03:56 CDT
Claus André Färber <usenet-format-list@faerber.muc.de> wrote:
> Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> schrieb:
> > 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.
Whether it is or not isn't really that important - it's only a one
character difference and they seem less likely to change something like
this. So whether it's to give older software a chance to quote without
going over 80 or to allow room for CRLF with older STMP agents, we
should simply go along on this.
> > 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 ---
Well, except for the = I see that a lot of this whether it's quoted
printable encoding or not. It doesn't seem like anybody want's to go to
the bother of trying to handle multilevel quoted text.
> 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.
That is of course the best way to reformat the text (although I'd only
recommend doing so upon user command), but a alternative would be to do:
--- 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 ---
This doesn't involve as much work, and is almost as good - at the very
lest it keeps the quote level the same, which is important when the next
quote puts it over the 80 chars limit and the same thing needs to be
done.
-- John Moreno