William ChopsWestfield wrote:

> The argument about whether the composer or reader should have more
> control of the formatting of the document has become a religious issue
> and is therefore banned from piclist :-)  

Wise words... I'll try to stay away from that :)

> The "problem" here is that the composer is assuming that the reader will
> format it, and the reader is assuming that the document is already
> correctly formated.   (probably.)

Actually I think the real problem is that some people use readers that
don't support email standards that post-date 1995...

> All the email standards (excepting MIME, which allows anything to be
> enclosed within an email) pretty much predate the concept of reader-side
> formatting of "content."  

..., for example MIME. A standard just as "standard" as SMTP, and almost as
widely supported, albeit not always correctly. I just can't see what's
wrong with it... I suppose even the guys that still use readers that don't
support MIME are using Flash PICs these days ("real men use EEPROM" :)

> I tend to believe that if you send a text email, it ought to be formatted
> with CRLFs after each line instead of after each paragraph.  Microsoft
> seems to have  disagreed, probably gratuitously, possibly maliciously,
> and almost certainly  arrogantly, and (unfortunately) they've been
> widely copied in modern mail clients.

How do you come to this conclusion? 

I don't use Outlook Express myself, but a quick check of posts by OE users
in mailing lists (like in this one -- for example michael brown's posts)
and newsgroups reveals that many are in fact hard-broken. I also know that
Outlook (the other Microsoft email client) provides an option to
automatically hard-wrap text. And I'm not sure, but I think both come
pre-configured to hard-wrap lines in text-only messages at column 72.

So it seems to me that whoever is using a Microsoft email or news client
and is not using a fixed line length in text messages does so because he
didn't configure it properly (or even changed the default setting). So even
though I'm not specifically a Microsoft fan, I don't see much reason in
stating that Microsoft "probably gratuitously, possibly maliciously, and
almost certainly arrogantly" violated any standard WRT this subject. This
judgment seems to tell more about the judge than the judged... (as most do
:)

Gerhard
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