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From: jef@unisoft.uucp (Jef Poskanzer)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.admin,news.misc
Subject: Re: Messages with >80-character lines
Message-ID: <696@unisoft.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 14-Oct-87 20:14:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: unisoft.696
Posted: Wed Oct 14 20:14:28 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 16-Oct-87 22:25:28 EDT
References: <767@quacky.UUCP>
Sender: news@unisoft.UUCP
Reply-To: jef@unisoft.UUCP (Jef Poskanzer)
Organization: Paratheo-Anametamystikhood Of Eris Esoteric, Ada Lovelace Cabal
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Xref: mnetor news.software.b:865 news.admin:1178 news.misc:1028

In the referenced message, dce@mips.UUCP (David Elliott) wrote:
}A year or so ago, I began noticing news postings with lines longer
}than 80 characters. These can be a real pain to read, and at one
}time I actually had my global rn kill file set up to junk all
}articles from Apollo (where most of these were coming from at the
}time).
}
}Anyway, with the proliferation of window systems on the net, I
}believe that we may be seeing more and more of this type of thing.
}
}First of all, is this a problem? If so, what can we do about it?
}If not, convince me that I shouldn't care (remember that it may
}be a while before I can get a wide terminal for home, where I read
}news).

It is a problem, and what we should do about it is fix the news-reading
and news-transferring programs to handle such messages in a reasonable
manner.  Real soon now, >80 character lines will become the norm, and
we had better be ready for them.

Many people have now discovered that the easiest and most natural way
to make text be screen-width-independent is to use <newline> as a
paragraph separator, not a line separator.  The program that displays
the text to the user then becomes responsible for breaking the paragraphs
up into screen lines.  You would not believe how much nicer this makes
things.  Not only does it solve the problem of different people using
different size windows and different width fonts, it also makes composing
text much more of a pleasure - no more reformatting.

Unfortunately, many programs have built-in limits on line length.
For example, pretty much every mailer on the DOD Internet does
disgusting things to lines >80 characters.  The SMTP protocol
specifies a maximum line length of 1000 characters.  And of course,
vi simply loses.

You can be sure that any programs I write can handle arbitrary-length
lines.  The rest of you had better start hacking...
---
Jef

    Jef Poskanzer  unisoft!jef@ucbvax.Berkeley.Edu  ...ucbvax!unisoft!jef
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