Tad Anhalt wrote:

>    RFCs are about interoperability.  If you stick to the RFCs, you can
> be pretty sure that things will mostly work most of the time.  It's not
> perfect, but what is?

But then, things _do_ change. Especially in computing -- and in computing
standards, real ones and de-facto. I don't think that an informal document
from 1995 (note that this is /not/ a standard) can be taken at its face
value without detailed analysis. Take the fact that almost nobody (not even
some of the defenders of the validity of this document) uses 65 character
wide lines as an example. I think that changing the line length from 65
characters to 72 characters is a rather arbitrary deviation usually
performed without reference to the cited RFC and without a clear goal in
mind, and doesn't help us much to solve any involved problems -- compared
to what I'm talking about, which would actually solve a real problem.

>    Besides, just from a most reward for least effort perspective,  it
> would be a lot easier to write a quick mail filter that would convert
> hard line stops to flowing text (and vice-versa) than getting everybody
> else in the world to agree to a new format.

There are a number of email and news clients that do that, but because of
the multitude of formatting styles in use and the differences in content,
this doesn't work very well.

And note that the problem these text reformatters try to solve predates
flowing text without hard returns. However short you set the line length,
quoted text that's not reflowed is bound to exceed the maximum line length
sooner or later -- assuming there is one (which is the base assumption for
setting a fixed line length in the first place). This is probably the
strongest argument for flowing text combined with a quoting standard. All
fixed-line-length cited text either looks ugly or needs to be reflowed --
manually or automatically.

Gerhard
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