4 ms·

It's 2012 and we're still arguing about line breaks and 80-character lines?

jarek 14y ago
It's 2012 and Gmail can't consistently reflow lines in emails between its flagship web client and its flagship Android client... so yes, it would appear so.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  What?
  - drivebyacct2 14y ago
    Okay. Thanks for the downvote, so I'll ask again, "what?". I don't know what you're talking about and have never experienced anything that might fit that description. Can you offer an example.
    - jarek 14y ago
      Sorry to see you downvoted. Reflowing refers to reconstructing lines broken by line wrapping. Here's the example I was referring to: Grab a couple of unwrapped paragraphs of lorem ipsum (make sure there's no explicit newlines) and email them to yourself as a plain-text email using the desktop web gmail interface. You will notice that when you open the email in your inbox, it shows up with line breaks - Gmail sent it with explicit newlines after ~80 characters. (Use Show Original if you want to confirm.) Now open the same email in the Gmail app on Android (I'm using Gmail 2.3.6 - the newest available on my Androids 2.2 and 2.3.6). My Android screen, like most smartphone screens, isn't wide enough to hold all 80 characters in one line, it's more like 50 or 60 characters. Gmail wraps the email to fit, which is expected and desirable. The problem is it keeps the original linebreaks at 80 characters, resulting in two linebreaks. Every other line is short at 20 or 30 characters and the email looks very jagged. Reading it is very uncomfortable. It gets really messy when you have quoted text, particularly with interleaved response style. There's actually a whole bunch of standards or semi-standards and techniques around doing this kinda stuff. Standalone mailers have been doing reflowing and format=flowed for a while now. Sad to see Gmail drop the ball on this.
Zikes 14y ago
I think 80-character lines are less an issue of the availability of horizontal screen space and more about readability. Much the same way proper sentence and paragraph spacing and structure lend to the readability of long articles or other blocks of text, a properly short line length can lend to the readability of commit logs.
- mikeash 14y ago
  Sure, but computers are much better at word wrapping than I am, so shouldn't they be the ones handling that?
dimituri 14y ago
Yes. http://nodeguide.com/style.html#line-length http://nodeguide.com/style.html#line-length
dmethvin 14y ago
If Github is going to show the first line of a commit message, it's damn handy to know how long that line would be so you don't get something stupid-looking like this: https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface/commit/bea6637c03a90fbb9e754f5f63625fffb7cbaa69 https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface/commit/bea6637c03a90f...

jarek 14y ago

It's 2012 and Gmail can't consistently reflow lines in emails between its flagship web client and its flagship Android client... so yes, it would appear so.

drivebyacct2 14y ago
What?
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Okay. Thanks for the downvote, so I'll ask again, "what?". I don't know what you're talking about and have never experienced anything that might fit that description. Can you offer an example.
  - jarek 14y ago
    Sorry to see you downvoted. Reflowing refers to reconstructing lines broken by line wrapping. Here's the example I was referring to: Grab a couple of unwrapped paragraphs of lorem ipsum (make sure there's no explicit newlines) and email them to yourself as a plain-text email using the desktop web gmail interface. You will notice that when you open the email in your inbox, it shows up with line breaks - Gmail sent it with explicit newlines after ~80 characters. (Use Show Original if you want to confirm.) Now open the same email in the Gmail app on Android (I'm using Gmail 2.3.6 - the newest available on my Androids 2.2 and 2.3.6). My Android screen, like most smartphone screens, isn't wide enough to hold all 80 characters in one line, it's more like 50 or 60 characters. Gmail wraps the email to fit, which is expected and desirable. The problem is it keeps the original linebreaks at 80 characters, resulting in two linebreaks. Every other line is short at 20 or 30 characters and the email looks very jagged. Reading it is very uncomfortable. It gets really messy when you have quoted text, particularly with interleaved response style. There's actually a whole bunch of standards or semi-standards and techniques around doing this kinda stuff. Standalone mailers have been doing reflowing and format=flowed for a while now. Sad to see Gmail drop the ball on this.

Zikes 14y ago

I think 80-character lines are less an issue of the availability of horizontal screen space and more about readability. Much the same way proper sentence and paragraph spacing and structure lend to the readability of long articles or other blocks of text, a properly short line length can lend to the readability of commit logs.

mikeash 14y ago
Sure, but computers are much better at word wrapping than I am, so shouldn't they be the ones handling that?

dimituri 14y ago

Yes. http://nodeguide.com/style.html#line-length http://nodeguide.com/style.html#line-length

dmethvin 14y ago

If Github is going to show the first line of a commit message, it's damn handy to know how long that line would be so you don't get something stupid-looking like this: https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface/commit/bea6637c03a90fbb9e754f5f63625fffb7cbaa69 https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface/commit/bea6637c03a90f...