From: G. James Berigan (usefor@war-of-the-worlds.org)
Date: Tue Feb 01 2000 - 14:56:41 CST
chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk (Charles Lindsey) wrote:
>kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) writes:
>>chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk (Charles Lindsey) wrote:
>>> Although, in accordance with [MESSFOR] and 4.6 of this standard, a
>>> newsgroups-line could have a maximum length of 998 octets, as a matter of
>>> policy a far lower limit, expressed in characters, SHOULD be set. A
>>> commonly accepted convention is to limit its length so that the
>>> newsgroup-name, the HTAB(s) (interpreted as 8-character tabs that takes
>>> one at least to column 24) and the newsgroup-description (excluding any
>>> moderation-flag) fit into 79 characters. However, this standard does not
>>> seek to enforce any such rule, and reading agents SHOULD therefore enable
>>> a newsgroups-line of any length to be displayed, e.g. by wrapping it as
>>> required.
>> Please take out any mention of 79 as a total line length.
> Why? That sentence describes existing practice exactly.
Existing practice isn't necessarily good practice. We should avoid setting
limits wherever possible, especially artificial (and artifactual) limits.
(Accidentally sent this to the wrong mailing list.)