From: Ian Bell (ianbell@turnpike.com)
Date: Wed Apr 03 2002 - 09:24:11 CST
On Wed, 3 Apr 2002, Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> wrote:
>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).
The former. You cannot _know_ where the paragraphs are in the original
quoted text if there is no format=flowed mark-up and so you can't change
hard breaks into soft breaks.
If you insert soft breaks without converting hard breaks, you are likely
to end up with <long line> <short line> <long line> <short line>
problems.
>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?
Yes
>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?
Not quite. Once a message hits a non-RFC2646 client, all previous flow
history will be lost. However, you may well end up with being able to
flow > and >>, but not >>> and >>>>. This happens all the time in our
support newsgroup.
>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'.
Also the space-stuffing "feature" can disrupt indented paragraphs if the
message is sent format=flowed even when the indented paragraph itself
isn't flowed.
-- Ian Bell T U R N P I K E