Re: [tlug] HTML email [was: Pre-installed linux?]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@??>]

Darren Cook writes:

 > Yes, many readers may have set for plain text, so never get to see your
 > HTML version. But, anyway, people with poor eyesight will have chosen a
 > bigger font, so all email is readable, not just yours.

Right.  Give a man a fish vs. teach him to fish.

The other point is that HTML is the wrong language these days.  The
right one is CSS.

 > > Anyway, the issue isn't one of only writing e-mail, it's going back
 > > and copy-pasting it into a text editor later (after it's already been
 > > sent) at which time the bloody hard returns are there...
 > 
 > Yes, this frustrates me too. Thunderbird has the Edit|Rewrap option to
 > tidy up long quote lines, but no support for going the other way: an
 > option to turn paragraphs into single lines when copying to the
 > clipboard would be lovely.

While I understand your pain[1], this is one I've never understood.
Really, those *are* single lines: it's all just whitespace, until you
hit an empty line![2]

Even Unicode recognizes that CR and LF have multiple conflicting uses,
by providing separate newline (!!) and paragraph break characters.

Does anything that properly treats "single line paragraphs" but
doesn't automatically reflow imported text really qualify as a "text
editor"?


Footnotes: 
[1]  Theoretically.  As an Emacs user, of course I don't feel it. ;-)

[2]  Sure, there's poetry and code.  Those are generally easy to
recognize, and if you don't *change* the newlines until saving, it's
trivial to redisplay the linebreaks at newline, and only there.  But
those are the unusual cases---reflowing should get precedence.