Re: could a piece of Swiss cheese survive in space?

From: Chris L Peterson (clp_at_alumni.caltech.edu)
Date: 01/21/05 

Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 18:53:46 GMT

On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 18:00:52 +0000 (UTC), brian@isi.edu (Brian Tung) wrote:

>But your text is pre-wrapped. It's just pre-wrapped to about 80
>characters or so. How is that any better? Auto-wrapping readers will
>then have alternating long and short lines.

Well how 'bout that! I guess the last time I rebuilt things wrapping got
re-enabled. I never deliberately set it to 80 characters, though. Maybe that is
an Agent default? I agree that an 80 character line is a bad choice- likely to
interact badly with anything that autowraps to the more common 72, and also
likely to look bad in many *nix and other ancient apps.

>Lastly, is it that difficult to remove the hard newlines automatically
>on a cut-and-paste? Surely, there's a utility (as there is in Unix)
>to do this.

Not hard. I just don't think that line formatting should normally be a component
of text that is targeted for an arbitrary range of viewers. Word processors
don't format lines. HTML doesn't format lines. Why should news posters? It's
nice to blow my window up to full screen and see a long thread without having to
scroll up and down, but that's only possible if there are no hard newlines.

In any case, I expect this is one of those philosophical arguments like top vs
bottom posting where no resolution is possible, and it just comes down to
personal taste. I can live with that.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

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