[Wolves] Netiquette

[Suntish T. Narain]

and for the love of god don't send copyrighted ebooks as pdf...

On 31 October 2015 at 05:38, James R. Haigh <james.r.haigh at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>     I too have some netiquette requests; some overlapping, some partially
> conflicting but seemingly in a resolvable way. My requests are:
> 1. ensure compatibility with mail clients that only operate on plaintext
> (i.e. some TUI and accessibility clients);
> 2. please don't hard-wrap your emails!;
>     2.1. if you use Thunderbird then please go to about:config
> (Preferences → ‘Advanced’ tab → ‘General’ subtab → ‘Config Editor…’) and
> set ‘mailnews.wraplength’ to 2147483647 (search ‘wrap’ to find it
> quickly);
>     2.2. if you know of equivalent solutions in other mail clients then
> please let me/others know;
> 3. start your message at the start of your email, or at least very near
> the start;
> 4. try not to unnecessarily increase the email's filesize.
>
>     These are not fundamentally incompatible with Ron's requests, and are
> somewhat overlapping, but there are some conflicting circumstances.
>     To satisfy point 3 without top-posting (Ron's point 2), one must
> either reply inline or not quote more than 2 or 3 lines. Both of these
> resolutions are acceptable and preferable anyway; the former has
> readability advantages and the latter helps to reduce filesize.
>     Sending of plain+HTML doesn't conflict with point 1, because a TUI
> email client that doesn't support HTML can simply use the plaintext part,
> and discard the HTML part if desired. Also, there exist TUI Web browsers
> (W3m, Lynx, Links, etc.) so it doesn't seem like HTML is fundamentally
> incompatible with TUI email clients, though, granted, it may not be
> implemented in someone's preferred client.
>     Sending of plain+HTML doesn't conflict with point 4 if this is
> considered a necessity. I consider the avoidance of hard-wrapping to be a
> necessity. However, there's no /fundamental/ reason why clients cannot
> address the plaintext hard-wrapping problem.
>
> ---- Avoidance of hard-wrapping of plaintext ----
>     Mail clients often can't easily be told to not hard-wrap when sending
> plaintext email, even though HTML email doesn't suffer from this issue.
> This used to be a reason for me to prefer plain+HTML emails as a
> best-of-both (except not best filesize). However, I've relatively recently
> found a way to disable hard-wrapping for the plaintext too in Thunderbird
> by setting ‘mailnews.wraplength’ to a number that would never cause
> hard-wrapping. That might as well be the 32-bit integer limit of
> 2147483647. When displayed, the email client soft-wraps the email at the
> currently available width, allowing windows to be resized arbitrarily and
> achieve preferred width for optimal readability or other reasons.
>     _Please note that I use a tiling window manager (XMonad), so being
> able to resize windows arbitrarily without breakage is as important as it
> is to not cause breakage for someone who prefers TUI mail clients._
>     I've never used a TUI mail client but even if I did I'd still find it
> important to have emails display at the with of /my/ terminal rather than
> the width of terminals of circa the 199th decade. Neither my virtual
> terminals (the TTYs accessible with (Ctrl+)Alt+F{1..6} by default on most
> distros) or my terminal emulator (Gnome Terminal) is set to a font size
> that gives about 80 characters width at the screen width, nor do I want it
> to be. ‘stty size’ reports that my virtual terminals are currently 48 rows,
> 128 columns and Gnome Terminal filling the XMonad+Taffybar workspace is 56
> rows, 145 columns. Worse still, when tiled vertically at half-width, the
> Gnome Terminals are 72 columns, just below the legacy 80 character
> convention, and this breaks terribly in that each line wraps its last word
> or 2 onto the next line. Hard-wrapping causes serious readability problems,
> and due to such an operation losing semantic information (the difference
> between true newlines and hard-wrap breakpoints), hard-wrapping can not
> unambiguously be corrected by software.
>     When inline-replying to individual sentences of a plaintext paragraph,
> remember to make sure that all parts of the paragraph that are now on their
> own line are proceeded with the correct number of greater than symbols
> (‘>’), one for each nested quote-level.
>
> ---- Unnecessary quoting ----
>     Inline-replying is generally the most readable way to reply but
> sometimes the points in the existing message don't directly correlate with
> how one wants to reply (as in this case) making it difficult to write in a
> way that flows in such cases. Top or bottom -posting can have serious
> problems for the reader. Nevertheless, when /nothing/ is quoted then
> there's no distinction between top, inline, and bottom -posting.
>     Seeing as the only reason for quoting an entire email when not
> replying inline is incase a recipient hasn't got a copy of the previous
> email, it seems much more appropriate to instead link to the publicly
> archived message rather than to duplicate the entire message for all
> existing mailing list members. That would replace lengthy, unnecessary
> quotes, greatly reducing filesize and clutter, as exemplified after my
> signature of this message. It also avoids the issue of broken flow of
> top-posting – the order of the flow is the order of chronological sorting
> in your mail client (or archive list), newest at the bottom being the
> recommended order.
>     However, this begs a way to automate it otherwise it would be tedious
> and inconsistent. Perhaps this should be implemented in GNU Mailman such
> that each footer that it applies to an email contains the archive URL of
> that email, then it's just a matter of deleting all of the quoted text
> except for this URL. This may not be trivial to implement though because it
> would require synchronous integration with Pipermail – the archive URL must
> be allocated before the email is sent and archived. Every email in the
> archives would contain a self-referencing URL in the footer. That has its
> advantages if it could be implemented, but I'm not sure how hard that would
> be.
>
> Can we find common ground on these issues?
>
> Best regards,
> James.
> --
> Sent from Thunderbird on NixOS!
> At 2015-10-29Thu10:14, Ron Wellsted wrote the message that is archived at:
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/wolves/2015-October/031509.html
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wolves LUG mailing list
> Homepage: http://www.wolveslug.org.uk/
> Mailing list: Wolves at mailman.lug.org.uk
> Mailing list home: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/wolves
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/wolves/attachments/20151031/1d66015b/attachment.html>