Why wrap @ 80?

[Taavi Burns]

On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 06:00:09PM -0400, gabriel wrote:
> sorry to rain on everyone's history less (as interesting as it is... i had no 
> idea this issue went so far back)  i have to ask.  when then are we going to 
> abandon this very, very old obsolete standard?  i understand that there's 
> still a great many users on this list and elsewhere using mutt and pine etc. 
> but why don't those programs compensate for 80+ character lines?  wouldn't 
> this help the rest of us get out of this nearly century-old restriction?

Do realise that even if the sender does not wrap to 66 characters,
your mail client _should_.  Why?  Because it's easier to read.
With more than about 66 characters to a line, your eyes start to
have trouble flipping from one side of the paragraph to the other.

As an experiment, go grab your favourite paperback from the shelf.
Pick a random line.  Count the number of characters in it.  :)
About the only professional publications that you'll find that use fewer
than approximately 66 characters are newspapers or textbooks
written in double-colum format; those documents would have _fewer_
than 66 characters per line.  Newspapers and magazines are written
in such narrow columns to facilitate speedreading.  A good skimmer
actually reads such columns in chunks of three lines or so.
Disturbing, eh?  ;)

So should linewrapping be done at the sending end or at the
receiveing end?  Probably at the receiving end.  It's just that
inline replies get very ugly.  Mail should really move to an XML
format that defines reply levels programattically...though
autoincrementing them might be a bit of a pain, it'd still be
better and allow for each client to display things as the user
prefers.  I'm sure that the > marks really mess with
text-to-speech synthesisers.

(of course they text-to-speech bits work fine, but that's why
blind people pay disgustingly large sums of money for these
programs with attempt to deal with the morass of random data
spewed forth from a plethora of disjointed sources)

My, I'm really getting my rant on today...

-- 
taa

   Indeed, the adolescents and adults responsible for community
   and predatory violence likely developed the emotional,
   behavioral, cognitive and physiological characteristics
   which mediate these violent behaviors as a result of
   intrafamilial violence during childhood.
         --Bruce D. Perry
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