4 ms·

What is with the insistence of (in-paragraph) hard line breaks on documents still? I put this page into Firefox's reader mode and I get lines breaking all over

by wjdp 7y ago

What is with the insistence of (in-paragraph) hard line breaks on documents still? I put this page into Firefox's reader mode and I get lines breaking all over the place as it's now got a mix of soft and hard line breaks. Should presentation of line length not be up to the client?

peapicker 7y ago
It it a <pre> formatted section from an old usenet post with 80 char line length... often on usenet posts were specially formatted with whitespace chars. Usenet display tools almost always use PRE and preserve that using monospace fonts to preserve the full possibilities of the information transfer.
- cpach 7y ago
  It’s from a mailing list, not Usenet.
acoard 7y ago
You're not wrong, but this is plaintext in its purest form. It's literally just plaintext wrapped in a <pre> tag. They don't use any CSS on the site, besides the very infrequent `style` tag. This is more common with the type of people who use text-based browsers like lynx. (edit: As another comment says, note they use 80 chars) But as someone who has bash aliases for extracting text from a website so I can read it in my terminal (or page it with `less -r`), yes, this is something that bugs me too.
gpanders 7y ago
The email is space-stuffed meaning it was probably written with format=flowed[1] (you can tell because there are spaces appended to hard-wrapped lines). That RFC was invented precisely for the purpose you mention: hard wrap lines in "dump" plain text clients, but allow "intelligent" clients to soft-wrap according to their own display width. This email would display at full-width in a client that respects format=flowed (many modern email readers, except for, notably, Outlook and Gmail). But as others have pointed out, this is literally just the plain text of the email wrapped in a <pre> tag, so you get the hard line breaks. [1]: https://joeclark.org/ffaq.html https://joeclark.org/ffaq.html
rhizome 7y ago
In Firefox's reader mode, click the "Aa" icon in the left-sidebar and you'll see -><- and <--> icons for changing the line length. Click <--> a couple times.

by wjdp 7y ago

peapicker 7y ago

It it a <pre> formatted section from an old usenet post with 80 char line length... often on usenet posts were specially formatted with whitespace chars. Usenet display tools almost always use PRE and preserve that using monospace fonts to preserve the full possibilities of the information transfer.

cpach 7y ago
It’s from a mailing list, not Usenet.

acoard 7y ago

You're not wrong, but this is plaintext in its purest form. It's literally just plaintext wrapped in a <pre> tag. They don't use any CSS on the site, besides the very infrequent `style` tag. This is more common with the type of people who use text-based browsers like lynx. (edit: As another comment says, note they use 80 chars) But as someone who has bash aliases for extracting text from a website so I can read it in my terminal (or page it with `less -r`), yes, this is something that bugs me too.

gpanders 7y ago

The email is space-stuffed meaning it was probably written with format=flowed[1] (you can tell because there are spaces appended to hard-wrapped lines). That RFC was invented precisely for the purpose you mention: hard wrap lines in "dump" plain text clients, but allow "intelligent" clients to soft-wrap according to their own display width. This email would display at full-width in a client that respects format=flowed (many modern email readers, except for, notably, Outlook and Gmail). But as others have pointed out, this is literally just the plain text of the email wrapped in a <pre> tag, so you get the hard line breaks. [1]: https://joeclark.org/ffaq.html https://joeclark.org/ffaq.html

rhizome 7y ago

In Firefox's reader mode, click the "Aa" icon in the left-sidebar and you'll see -><- and <--> icons for changing the line length. Click <--> a couple times.