From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 02 2002 - 21:38:55 CST
Dan Kohn <dan@dankohn.com> writes:
> It's not clear how format=flowed could have been improved, given that
> many popular MUAs (in violation of RFC 2046) present text/paragraph as
> an attachment rather than text/plain. The argument for 2646 is that
> even nicely formatted 74 character lines, when quoted 5 times, will
> start exhibiting embarrassing line wrap. Many MTAs (e.g., Exchange)
> wrap at unpredictable and user-uncontrollable lengths, even the first
> reply can get line lengths mangled. Given that 2646 has the potential
> to solve the problem completely, it seems a shame not to mention it.
Agreed. RFC 2646 is a very nice practical solution to a real problem, and
it works very seamlessly both with clients that support it and clients
that don't. It's even more elegant than it immediately appears in how
well it works.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>