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Election 2006 (and beyond): Digital Copyright Canada

RE: question about nowar forum

From: "Paul Gross" <paul_-at-_paulgross.com>
To: "Russell McOrmond" <russell_-at-_flora.ca>, <flora-admin-help_-at-_flora.org>
Cc: <psmith_-at-_web.ca>
Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2003 14:48:08 -0500

Hi Russell,

>   The real solution is to get people to word wrap their own text messages
> properly when the message is sent.  This archiver is not the only software
> out there that will break with one-paragraph=1-line email software.  The
> fix is with the sender of the message, not with the software used to
> archive them.

We will update the instructions to tell people to word warp. Although I
doubt we will have much luck achieving this.

There is no need to get into a back and forth on this, but here are my
thoughts on the matter.


>   There is no simple technological solution to this problem.  If you
> word-wrap messages or drop the <pre> tag then other aspects of the message
> (long URL's, ascii-art and tables, etc) will be broken.

If the text is displayed as normal text and flows within the browser window
(or a table), long URL's (which we do care about) will work. Long URL's may
appear wrapped on the screen (but probably will not since there will no
spaces to break on) but the underlying link will be intact. If, however,
users set their e-mail to word wrap (i.e., insert hard returns at character
72)  that will likely break long url's.

The commercial host of our other mail list
(http://topica.com/lists/cpi-org/read) displays messages as regular text and
it seems to work well. This approach will break ascii-art and tables but no
one posts these.

The other suggestion would be to use a fixed width font, such as courier, so
that ascii-art and tables will work without defeating the browser word wrap.

Thanks and we totally appreciate flora hosting  the list.

- Paul


> > > Messages without line breaks are hard to read on the web site, e.g.,
> > > http://www.flora.org/nowar/forum/3803
> > >
> > > I am wondering:
> > > 	- Can this be rectified on the site, either by wrapping the
> text or adding
> > > line breaks?

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