[Haskell-beginners] Re: Re: Compiling C into Haskell

[Maciej Piechotka]

On Fri, 2010-04-16 at 08:28 +0100, Thomas Davie wrote:
> On 16 Apr 2010, at 08:20, Ertugrul Soeylemez wrote:
> 
> > Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente <magnicida at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> I am going a bit off-topic here...
> > 
> > Me too, but that's how mailing lists work. =)
> > 
> > 
> >> 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.
> > 
> > The big problem is that some mail/news readers assume that lines are
> > prebroken, especially when it comes to older terminal-based readers.
> 
> I'd highly recommend that you stop using such readers, or patch them to soft-wrap long lines, neither is difficult.
> 

Except that it may be a line which should not be wrapped. For example
ascii table should not be wrapped as it destroys the content. Pice of
code in Haskell or python as well.

And pre-breaking have little problems, confirms to RFC and causes no
problems (excepts in broken screen readers. I understand that software
should be accessible but it should follow the conventions that was
already established a long time ago).

> > In fact I would love if HTML mails would be more accepted in the open
> > source community.  After all there is nothing bad about HTML and it
> > would solve the above problem.  Most reasonings against it are related
> > to compatibility or interoperability, which is no problem, because you
> > can always add a text/plain part.
> 

Add quoting and size. While for 'normal' users it is not a problem it
might be problem for users which uses EDGE/GPRS/... to get their mail.
From example from http://www.asciiribbon.org/ (not counting sound as it
lazy download) - it's 231 K. Text plain is 3K. If you can download 1 MB
via EDGE/GPRS/... or pay a lot for extra download - it HAVE a difference
(compare using 23% of limit to download a mail and 0.3%).

Personally I'd choose to always show text/plain message as:
 - Security reasons. Last time I heard about text/plain exploit was here
- http://ur1.ca/ve1h ;). Ok - I don't use Outlook Express or anything on
MSHTML but still there are exploits from time to time.
 - I cannot use terminal. Sometimes I have to use terminal to browse
web/read e-mail. I can tell that HTML engines on terminal are terribly
underdeveloped.
 - Quoting. text/plain quoting is very simple. HTML quoting can be quite
hard - how to quote a part of table? what to do with CSS?

> I suspect the only way this would solve the problem is by forcing people not to use broken email clients – you can't read an html email in an old email client, in the same way as you can't read a non-hard-wrapped email in an ancient email client.
> 

If you mean by 'ancient' released not longer then month ago and
confirming to spec then yes ;)

> Anyway, my basic point is that an email client that will not soft-wrap lines is fundamentally broken.  Emails can and do have lines longer than 80 characters, and a client that can't render them has a serious bug.  If your client is one of these, I suggest you either (a) move to a less buggy client, or (b) write a patch to fix the bug.  The correct solution though is not to enforce upon everyone else that they must write emails with a particular line length.
> 
> Bob

Hmm. I guess you can send to the IEFT - all I found in RFC was limits
(ok. different - 60, 78 and 80). 

Regards
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