From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Apr 03 2002 - 04:33:55 CST
In <A23DE7A325D23B49A76B54080E0BCB9E0BA234@kabul.ad.skymv.com> "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.
Question of clarification:
One has the precursor article, and the followup article (which may
contains quoted extracts from the precursor). There are four
possibilities, with either, neither or both of the articles having
format-flowed.
In preparing my followup, am I allowed/expected to insert new soft breaks
in the quoted text regardless, or may I only do that if the precursor was
flowed (i.e. where it already had lines with trailing spaces).
And when displaying an article with quoted text (at various levels) am I
only allowed to reflow those quoted lines which happen to have trailing
spaces? If that is so, and some of the quoted messages were flowed and
some not, then it would seem that I might be able to reflow the lines
starting with '>>>' and '>', but not those starting with '>>>>' and '>>'.
It that correct?
ANd BTW, my main objection to the whole RFC 2646 thing is that it does not
allow indented text to be reflowed, though they could easily have arranged
it my allowing for a 'space depth' as well as a 'quoting depth'.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5