RFC: Lazy syntax for paragraphs, blockquotes and lists

[Thomas Humiston]

On Sep 3, 2010, at 1:55 PM, david parsons wrote:


> 78 character line length is an artifact of ttys traditionally being  

> 80 columns wide, as well as an artifact of the annoying habit of  

> some ttys to force a newline if you write a character into the last  

> cell on the screen.




According to Ken Spreitzer at Tiger Technologies, word wrap is not  
just an artifact:


> Actually, the official Internet email specifications ("RFC"s) still  

> require outgoing messages to be broken. Please see this page for an  

> interesting discussion of this:

>

> http://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html



The above URL provides links to the relevant RFCs. Below is a larger  
portion of my conversation with Ken, which began with a question about  
a webmail program called Mailman:

Thomas:


> Regarding word wrap in Mailman -- I like email messages without a  

> hard wrap (at, say 70 characters per line). This limit is no longer  

> necessary, is it? I'm trying out Mailman and I like everything about  

> it except this. (Plain text -- yeehah!)



Ken:


> Mailman doesn't change the word wrap on any message it distributes.

>

> Your mail program (Apple Mail) is sending out messages with lines  

> wrapped at 70 characters. This is actually the way that email is  

> supposed to be done, and the receiving mail program should then re- 

> flow the text so that it doesn't look like it was word-wrapped. What  

> mail program was being used to view the received mailing list message?


Thomas:


> I'm afraid that is outdated info. I have verified that Apple Mail is  

> not inserting wraps.

>

> That email is _supposed_ to contain wraps is, AFAIK, an old  

> convention that evolved because of server and/or software  

> limitations, limitations that no longer exist. Remember when you  

> could only attach one file per message? Similar case.


Ken:


> Actually, the official Internet email specifications ("RFC"s) still  

> require outgoing messages to be broken. Please see this page for an  

> interesting discussion of this:

>

> http://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html

>

> What's happening in this case is that Apple Mail is doing something  

> a little smarter than the average mail program. It's fully  

> compliant, but not every other mail program out there supports it.  

> Basically, Apple Mail adds a "format-flowed" to the Content-Type  

> mail header. This acts as a hint that the receiving mail program can  

> remove the line breaks and re-flow each block of lines into a word- 

> wrapped paragraph. This is a standard, but not every mail program  

> supports it when displaying messages. Apple Mail does, of course,  

> which is why it probably looks like the paragraph isn't broken up  

> when you view a message in Apple Mail.

>

> You can easily see this in practice. Send yourself a test message  

> using Apple Mail. Then view the received message's raw source (View   

> Message Raw Source). You'll see that the received message has been  

> split into multiple lines.

>

> So this is all standards-compliant. The other thing to mention is  

> that the version of Mailman we're using does not pass that  

> "format=flowed" header through. A later version of Mailman does pass  

> it through, which would definitely help with your problem, but we  

> don't have any specific plan for when we will be installing the  

> newer version.



I hope the above is helpful regarding this Markdown-dev question.

- Thomas