[Design] url wrapping in email (Was: High End Email)

[Blake Ramsdell]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: design-admin@osafoundation.org 
> [mailto:design-admin@osafoundation.org] On Behalf Of petite_abeille
> Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2003 2:23 AM
> To: design@osafoundation.org
> Subject: Re: [Design] url wrapping in email (Was: High End Email)
> 
> > Or we can just use the standard MIME construct of quoted-printable 
> > which
> > solves this problem completely.
> 
> As far as Chandler goes, yes. The application should be smart 
> enough to 
> use quoted-printable when appropriate. But what about those 
> lesser life 
> forms daring not to use Chandler? Of course Chandler could very 
> appropriately mandate to communicate only with other Chandler 
> users. In 
> which case life will be swell ;-)

Well, in this case, the only incompatibility would be with non-MIME
aware mail agents, which should predate 1993 (to be conservative).

The alternative, back-wrapping, is a hard, hard problem -- Bob Wyman and
I worked on ConnectSoft's Email Connection back in the old days (1995),
and we attempted to solve the problem of "did the sending agent or some
intermediate agent do something whacky here and wrap the lines in a
strange place, and can we fix it", with varied results.  Quoting and
tables tend to be the ickier things to deal with.

> > Of course, this will offend troglodyte (trogluddite? ;)) mail users 
> > that
> > absolutely can't stand having the "=" character at the end 
> of lines to
> > represent soft line breaks.  Sigh.
> 
> Plus I heard that troglodytes don't take such offenses lightly. Be 
> prepared for an onslaught of not compliant emails as a well deserve 
> reprisal. You have been warned ;-)

Yeah, they hate four line trailers added by the mailing list also ;).  I
guess we're all in trouble in one way or another.  This may be an
important thing to understand -- "no matter what you implement, someone
will hate it, so try to get the fewest people to hate you, or just
implement whatever you want".

Blake