Why wrap @ 80?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Apr 24, 2004 at 12:35:10AM -0600, Taavi Burns wrote:
[snip]
> 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.

If I send a chunk of source code, or a some data, that has to be shown a
certain way and needs 75 character width, I will write it as such.  If I
am just writing paragraphs of text, I wrap it at 66 or 70 or so.  I know
the context of what I am doing, so i can wrap it correctly.  The
receiving client does NOT have context and hence can not know what is
correct to do.  Hence the sender wraps and the receiver should not.  The
one with context is the only one that can do the correct thing.

[snip]

Lennart Sorensen
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