[H-GEN] A Call for Peace

[David Jericho]

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On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 08:27:36AM +1000, Tony Bilbrough wrote:
> But this one bit seemed to keep cropping up and I am not sure what it
> means
> it's this 
> "80 column boundaries and plain text restrictions"

Stems back to the days of dumb terminals and other text mode display
devices. 

80 columns is because that's how wide a lot terminals are. It's a pain
to have to scroll horizontally because your terminal isn't wide enough
and your program doesn't wordwrap.[0]

For example, while my mail reader does word wrap at 76 columns when
viewing email, when I go to reply to the email, Vim keeps the original  
text verbatim and I end up with a single line of text across the screen. 
Much like that run on sentence. It can be a real pain to reedit that
text back to 76 columns so I don't commit the same sin.

Plain text is usually considered to be the easily printable ASCII[1] 
character set. That's ASCII decimal 32 (space) through to ASCII decimal 
126 (~). Some terminals interpret values outside of these to be control 
characters, and as such will do evil things to the display (and 
readability).

> Just what does it mean and how does one set it up?
> Or is this a 'silly old twit' sort of question?

IMVVHO, the plain text thing is becoming a little more irrelevant[2] as
more and more mail readers are transparently filtering out HTML and
other associated rubbish, but it's still a polite thing to do plain
text. 

> I quite often use Windows and Netscape to view my mail, especially when
> I am having a hard time with something on my Linux box.
> I have never set up any of my Windows mailers for "80 column boundaries
> and plain text restrictions".

Netscape takes sane values as its defaults (usually). My version of
mutt believes you have sent plain text.

Most of the etiquette related to email can be found in the ways we
write plain paper letters.

Reply point by point. Include relevant information. Make it easy to
read and view (no secret lemon juice invisible ink). Take no offence,
give no offence. There are a few articles out on the net about mail
etiqutte, but AJ's comes to mind. You can find it at
http://www.humbug.org.au/netiquette.html 

[0] Just did a quick check. Most business letters I have here are
    approximately 80 characters wide too.
[1] man 7 ascii 
[2] Yes, bandwidth and yes, people will disabilities, but like I said,
    (Unix) software is handling the rubbish email a bit better nowdays.

--
David Jericho

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