Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Dec 26, 2020 2:25 UTC (Sat) by zlynx (guest, #2285)
In reply to: Better tools for kernel developers by foom
Parent article: Better tools for kernel developers

> Gmail hard-wraps plaintext mails at 78 columns. It should stop doing so. Fixing this in gmail would also make its plaintext emails more readable on mobile devices.

It's vague in my memory, but I am almost certain that wrapping around 72 and definitely before 80 is *required* for email user agents.

Yes, yes, it is commonly ignored for pasted or included content, but any email program that you type into is supposed to wrap long line at some point before 80, leaving room for at least three levels of quotes, like "> > > " which is six. So at least 74, more likely 72. 78 is being overly generous really.

This kind of sounds like someone complaining about Google's GMail *following standards*. Weird.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Dec 26, 2020 5:02 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

There's no hard requirement that user agents wrap text - it's convention to do so for the purposes of quoting stuff on 80 characters wide terminals, but doing so is inherently lossy when using plain ASCII (there's no way to tell the difference between a 72-character line followed by an 8-character line and an 80-character line that got hard wrapped). RFC5322 does say that agents SHOULD place a 78-character restriction on line length, but the context provided makes it pretty clear that it's talking about written language rather than code.

Better tools for kernel developers

Posted Dec 27, 2020 4:23 UTC (Sun) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

Sure, that was a common convention in the past, but many other user agents have stopped hard-wrapping years ago, because at this point it does more harm than good.