From: Josef 'Jupp' SCHUGT <jupp@...>
Date: 2005-08-16T04:18:24+09:00
Subject: Re: how to format text when posting to this group

Hi!

At Fri, 12 Aug 2005 05:42:17 +0900, hsun wrote:
> Just posted a message and the format got messed up. All line reurns
> are gone.

Recommended format:

1. 7bit,
2. ISO 646-US,
3. text/plain
4. < 72 chars/line
5. no flowed format

As long as you stay away from non-ASCII 8bit in place of 7bit is no
problem (few if any people will notice the difference) and
quoted-printable results in issues that can usually be neglected (some
people may see the difference but those guys know how to deal with
it). Never use other transfer encodings.

ISO 646-US it nothing but ASCII.

It usally is no problem if you use any of the charsets that have ASCII
as a subset (like ISO 8859-1, ISO 2022-JP, UTF-8) and stay within the
range of ISO-646-US.

text/plain is beyond any discussion - it so to say has been proclaimed
ex cathedra.

Up to 79 chars/line are still acceptable. The limit of roughly 75
characters has two backgrounds. Longer lines are notably harder to
read and standard terminals have 80 characters a line which means
annoying artificial linebreaks. 

flowed text is renders 4. useless and may result in unwanted display
of messages - depending on the circumstances either when reading the
massage with a mail user agent that supports it or with one that does
not support it (both is possible). flowed text comes with a huge
"Pandora's box - Do not open!" sticker.

Josef 'Jupp' SCHUGT
-- 
Terrorism is the systematic use of violence and brutality as a means of
gaining some political end. So the "War on Terrorism" is a failure if
it increases violence and brutality and even may be terrorism by itself
if some well-known incidents turn out not to be singular ones.      :-|