On Fri, 2010-04-16 at 09:05 +0300, Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente wrote:
I am going a bit off-topic here...
PS. Could you limit length of line to 72-80 characters? Thank you in advance.
Please, don't impose others how to format their email. There is an interesting reasoning in favor of not breaking lines in email: it is better for accessibility, because of how screen-readers for visually impaired people work. I will quote a message by the accessibility expert Chris Hofstader:
I forgot to mention that, when using a screen reader, many users try to maximize their line width so, if reading by line, they can often get an entire paragraph with a single down arrow rather than reading through superfluously narrow lines which have two problems: 1. they require more keystrokes which 2. break up a user's concentration as the flow of sentences are broken up by needing to take action a every few words.
Depends on the logic of down key. Some editors make down key jump to corresponding visual line some corresponding real line.
And what is the universally best length of line anyway? I have also seen people sending emails with really thin columns that get annoying to read... If you feel bad about emails sent with long lines, just enable text wrapping in your email reader.
According to RFC 1855 - 65 characters: "- Limit line length to fewer than 65 characters and end a line with a carriage return." http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855 So it is official. Traditionally the paragraphs are separated by two newlines so there is no problem
And yes, I wrap the text in my email because I know there are many people like you, but maybe this message will help us in being more tolerant about how others use their tools --I did not know about these accessibility issues a few months ago neither!
JP
Screen readers could be easily patched too (to skip whole paragraph on key down or shift+key down). The paragraph for email has been traditionally separated by two newlines. Regards