[svlug] Convincing Rationale URL for Old Man to Shorten Email Line Length?

[claw@kanga.nu]

On Mon, 4 Jun 2001 22:40:51 -0700  
Karsten M Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> on Mon, May 28, 2001 at 10:59:52PM -0700, J C Lawrence
> (claw at kanga.nu) wrote:

>> Pet peeve: I do wish people wouldn't insert space characters in
>> quote strings.  It wasts space, is no more readable, encourages
>> bad line folding, and tends to break software that handles quote
>> reformatting.

Correction: I'm complaining of intra-quote character space.

> Space is there to be wasted (spoken as one who's just driven
> through some 2200 miles of it, and then some).

Aye, I've driven the coast-to-coast trip as well (tho that's a bit
more than 2.2K).

> I disagree with you on virtually all points: I don't see the space
> as wasted, it makes identifying nesting levels more, not less,

Disagreed.  I find it visually easier to distinguish between the
following two quote levels:

  >> This is some older quoted text
  >> This is some older quoted text
  >> This is some older quoted text

  > This is some newer quoted text.
  > This is some newer quoted text.
  > This is some newer quoted text.

And this more difficult to visually distinguish between levels:

  > > This is some older quoted text
  > > This is some older quoted text
  > > This is some older quoted text

  > This is some newer quoted text.
  > This is some newer quoted text.
  > This is some newer quoted text.

My eyes tend to see the " >" (note leading space) as a potential
letter/word rather than as an indentation token.

> Plus you only need one rule for quoting content: take the current
> line and preface it with '> '.  

Accepted, tho I would also expect any reasonable tool to reflow the
text to fiti reasonable margins.

> Your style needs two rules.  Not a major deal breaker, but a bit
> of additional complexity, and believe you me, 95% of email client
> authors will break it somehow.

True.  I've got a elisp chunk that sits in front of one of my
mailing lists that tries to munge posts to a more acceptable format
(s/> >/>>/ is one of the operations as is s/^>* *$//).  It has
received several compliments on improving the readability of the
list (and one complaint that it redented one fellow's itemised
list).

-- 
J C Lawrence                                       claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
The pressure to survive and rhetoric may make strange bedfellows