Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favor of my mail client displaying mail in an easy to read fashion. I do consider it the job of a mail client to render mail that is received this way. But that's very different from mucking with what I type on the way out. Software like Outlook may does such mucking. I've lost track of how many times a long URL is broken by that particular mail client. But I definately consider it a bug in outlook, and one of the reasons not to use it. With markup like HTML, we consider it the job of the browser to display it correctly. Email is no different. I still don't see any reason to break the lines. (Tradition not being an influence on drupal in any other area AFAIK.) :) -Dave On Friday 08 October 2010 11:10:47 Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:

...

So what am I missing? Can anyone tell me why this "feature" is in there?

It is generally difficult to read lines that are too long. That's why books, newspapers etc all have some character limit. Email just follows this. The 80 character limit is due to early computers having exactly this limit.

Cheers, Gerhard

On 10/8/2010 11:47 AM, nan wich wrote:

@Gerhard: 80 lines was how long a punch card was. What a ridiculous reason to use 80 any more. Are you even old enough to have ever seen a punch card? I almost forgot, the original IBM System/3 had punch cards

Yes, Nancy, there are actually a few adults on this list. Though I doubt many of us are old enough to have actually USED a punch card, since people who did work on punch cards should be pretty close to retirement age by now. 80 characters was the common width of monitors, which descended from punch cards, but is also pretty close to the 72 character width of the common typewriter (pica, if I remember right) with standard margins. RFC 2822 imposed the limit (as a SHOULD not MUST) because many terminals failed to wrap on their own, and terminals often had 80 CPL in order to be standard. Though many terminals also had 132 or, if you were unfortunate enough to use a VIC-20 (and maybe a PET, I forget) you could get 40 CPL. Also, RFC2822 is still in effect; if an email message is in text/plain, it is polite to go ahead and wrap at 78 per the spec. If your message is text/html then wrapping is pointless.

029 with no memory, or 129 that would actually let you backspace? Remember the card sorters with the 500 card feeds, and the additional 1,000 card hopper? Or the first time you dropped a 1,000 card box and hadn't serialized the cards? The dual pass fortran compilers? Had to read the fortran card deck in twice before it was ready to compile. Or the 4' tall magnetic drum hard disks. Oh boy! I've got 15 years yet, depending. -Don- On 10/9/2010 1:17 AM, Steve Ringwood wrote:

On 10/8/2010 11:52 PM, Earl Miles wrote:

...

Yes, Nancy, there are actually a few adults on this list. Though I doubt many of us are old enough to have actually USED a punch card, since people who did work on punch cards should be pretty close to retirement age by now.

Some of have worked with punch cards and while older are a ways from retirement.

replace /1403/1130/ +1 nanwich On 10/09/2010 01:30 AM, jeff@ayendesigns.com wrote:

I didn't think anyone saw me drop that box! I remember the 1403 was so slow that you could watch the cards being read... and if you forgot to mark the lead card as a temporary job, the disk would fill up and the box would die.

On 10/8/2010 10:25 PM, jeff@ayendesigns.com wrote:

Whoa! Retirement age??!! I used punch cards, card sorters, wrote device drivers to get the keyboard to talk to the cpu, developed functions to store and retrieve records from files before databases, and wrote my first few dozen apps in mnemonic assembler, used 8" hard-sectored floppies, a converted IBM selectric as line printer, CP/M, PC-DOS, Windows 1, and remember my jaw dropping when they rolled out the first CRT (you can backspace?!)... and I've got at almost 20 years yet until I retire, though I can take up a collection if I need to go sooner!

20 years from retirement makes you only a few years older than I am. I remember the 8" floppies, IBM selectrics, CP/M (though I missed Windows 1 since I got my start in the Apple and Commodore sides)...but rarely did I ever see punch cards even hanging around serious geeks in the 80s. Maybe it's background related. Or maybe the 80s were longer than I remember them being. But my memory is that by the late 70s, punch cards were pretty much on their way out, and by the time PCs came to market in the early 80s, nobody was using them except for places with legacy systems that couldn't be upgraded -- and that's 40 years ago now. I remember visiting a facility that used punch cards in the 80s, but even they thought they were antiques at that point. Just to check my history, I did a quick google and found some terminals with monochrome displays, I assume CRTs, from 1969. That's 40 years ago by itself. If you were a working adult in the 60s, that'd make you late 50s at best, and late 50s isn't 20 years from retirement age (whether or not people retire at retirement age is another story). If you were a kid in the 60s and happened to be near people who used the stuff, that's pretty lucky. I know as a teenager in the 80s I had to work pretty hard to get near computers until I managed to wheedle my parents into getting me one.

Hi Sent from my iPad On 09/10/2010, at 10:26 PM, Pierre Rineau <pierre.rineau@makina-corpus.com> wrote: On Sat, 2010-10-09 at 00:07 -0700, Earl Miles wrote: Amiga's were the best boxes ever designed, still have one running @home, seriously tweaked to fit in a ATX tower with some wires manually welded on the motherboard to make recent the power block running it. I did exactly same thing to my Amiga 500. I use to run my BBS on it when it was connected up to fido net Yay \o/ I will never loose those memories neither. Yes those were the days. The computers seemed to mean more than they do now Gordon Pierre. Pierre.

@earl You're right. I got my start in the late 70's while finishing my degree. They didn't wheel in the first CRT there until '78. It was probably that they didn't have the money for them (or the machines to connect them to or the system programmers to make the machines work) until then. I remember not long after seeing that one, maybe 2 or 3 years, that someone came out with an amber one instead of green...we all wanted one!

Just to check my history, I did a quick google and found some terminals with monochrome displays, I assume CRTs, from 1969.

On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 3:07 AM, Earl Miles <merlin@logrus.com> wrote:

On 10/8/2010 10:25 PM, jeff@ayendesigns.com wrote:

...

Whoa! Retirement age??!! I used punch cards, card sorters, wrote device drivers to get the keyboard to talk to the cpu, developed functions to store and retrieve records from files before databases, and wrote my first few dozen apps in mnemonic assembler, used 8" hard-sectored floppies, a converted IBM selectric as line printer, CP/M, PC-DOS, Windows 1, and remember my jaw dropping when they rolled out the first CRT (you can backspace?!)... and I've got at almost 20 years yet until I retire, though I can take up a collection if I need to go sooner!

20 years from retirement makes you only a few years older than I am. I remember the 8" floppies,

Did you ever see a mainframe that had its firmware on one of those? And when it booted, perhaps once a week, you got a prompt on the console to flip the diskette so it would read the other site. After that it was the operating system. IBM selectrics, CP/M (though I missed Windows

1 since I got my start in the Apple and Commodore sides)...but rarely did I ever see punch cards even hanging around serious geeks in the 80s.

Mainframes is where it mainly was in the 80s. At that time, UNIX systems were available and they used "glass terminals", hence vi (visual editor) rather than ed. The original "terminals" were teletypes with paper output.

Maybe it's background related. Or maybe the 80s were longer than I remember them being. But my memory is that by the late 70s, punch cards were pretty much on their way out, and by the time PCs came to market in the early 80s, nobody was using them except for places with legacy systems that couldn't be upgraded -- and that's 40 years ago now.

Saw punched cards in production in 1990 and maybe 1991. Again, older mainframes.

I remember visiting a facility that used punch cards in the 80s, but even they thought they were antiques at that point.

Just to check my history, I did a quick google and found some terminals with monochrome displays, I assume CRTs, from 1969. That's 40 years ago by itself. If you were a working adult in the 60s, that'd make you late 50s at best, and late 50s isn't 20 years from retirement age (whether or not people retire at retirement age is another story).

No, the timeline is a bit shifted. Cards were used in the 80s, and if someone was in early to mid 20s then, then they still have 1.5 decades, give or take, to retire.

If you were a kid in the 60s and happened to be near people who used the stuff, that's pretty lucky. I know as a teenager in the 80s I had to work pretty hard to get near computers until I managed to wheedle my parents into getting me one.

Yes. Sinclair ZX Spectrum! -- Khalid M. Baheyeldin 2bits.com, Inc. http://2bits.com Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting. Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. -- Edsger W.Dijkstra Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. -- Leonardo da Vinci

Yes, I am close to "retirement age" and had my 61st birthday yesterday. I am not planning on retiring any time soon. Yes, I did actually use punch cards. When I started in "Data Processing" there were no CRTs; electronically modified typewriters were state of the art. The few disk drives had platters that measured in feet with heads that were as big as your fist - oh, and held an incredible 5 mega bytes of data! And if you wanted your program to run fast, you wrote in assembler language because compilers (forget interpreted languages) produced pretty poor code. And you just filled in a mystery for me. Most computer languages only used the first 72 characters of the card, leaving the last 8 for a sequence number so you could put the cards into a mechanical sorter if you ever dropped them. I always wondered where the 72 came from. Minor correction though: IBM's first CRT was the 2260, which had 12 lines of 40 characters. It was a big improvement when the 3270 came out with 24 lines of 80 characters. They later produced a version that would display up to 132 characters (printer width). Yes, I had a Vic-20 with it's casette tape storage. I quickly upgraded to the Commodore 64. Before the Vic-20, I used a Radio Shack TRS-80 to produce at-home banking.   Nancy Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. ________________________________ From: Earl Miles On 10/8/2010 11:47 AM, nan wich wrote:

@Gerhard: 80 lines was how long a punch card was. What a ridiculous reason to use 80 any more. Are you even old enough to have ever seen a punch card?  I almost forgot, the original IBM System/3 had punch cards

Yes, Nancy, there are actually a few adults on this list. Though I doubt many of us are old enough to have actually USED a punch card, since people who did work on punch cards should be pretty close to retirement age by now. 80 characters was the common width of monitors, which descended from punch cards, but is also pretty close to the 72 character width of the common typewriter (pica, if I remember right) with standard margins. RFC 2822 imposed the limit (as a SHOULD not MUST) because many terminals failed to wrap on their own, and terminals often had 80 CPL in order to be standard. Though many terminals also had 132 or, if you were unfortunate enough to use a VIC-20 (and maybe a PET, I forget) you could get 40 CPL. Also, RFC2822 is still in effect; if an email message is in text/plain, it is polite to go ahead and wrap at 78 per the spec. If your message is text/html then wrapping is pointless.

Ahh, as crell once told me "OLD SKOLL". Little off subject but as we're reminiscing here a little, my first intro into cumputing was 1972 and fortran 4. Yep punch cards. I can remember my high school instructor chewing me out for putting a prime number program into a loop and used a whole box of paper. (He wasn't in the room when I started feeding the puch cards <G>). Afterwards though I took up electronics for a while. fell off the radar till 84 when at a new job run on a ncr2100 with 12 inch floppies, no hard drive. Bought one of the first ibm pc's, had a whopping 128k of memory and a 10 meg hard drive. price of that unit was $16K. memory cards back then were either 32 or 64 bit chips and it was easier to replace a whole bank of chips rather than find the one that failed (They hadn't come out with the memory tracing programs back then). Then 10 meg harddrive took up both 5.25 in bays and the floppy drive took up the other 5.25. Yep it had a 80 column monitor and was B/W, Ended up taking that box and hooking up to adds terminals to it and even with the other 2 terminals it would outrun the ncr 2100. That particular instance set me up as the computer guru there (HAha) and one of my many task was keeping the systems running. It also made me in charge of what was run on them. Back then you had very few choices, mainly dos and pick (a main frame db system which was originally hardware coded into machines such as fugitsu, ga automations, ncr's, etc..) nix was around back then but didn't really get into it too much. I chose pick as it used the least resources and was faster than dos, and once again got into programming with basic (actually pick basis, picks version of basic that you could peek and poke into memory and also had some early C but in). It's still my choice of languages today for business logic but overall I still prefer building servers and workstations over programming. getting back to topic, I was taught that text emails, for readablility, should be 72 characters. It was a recommendation, not a must. The 72 character pretty much gave you the look of a typewritter and gave room for a sense of a right magrin. I still have clients and associates who use, even prefer this style of email. I myself prefer text still over html but guess you could call that my "OLD SKOOL" preference. As far as the sender goes in todays atmosphere, emails should be available in both text and html but it's still up to the receiver to determine their preference. On 10/9/2010 9:11 AM, nan wich wrote:

Yes, I am close to "retirement age" and had my 61st birthday yesterday. I am not planning on retiring any time soon. Yes, I did actually use punch cards. When I started in "Data Processing" there were no CRTs; electronically modified typewriters were state of the art. The few disk drives had platters that measured in feet with heads that were as big as your fist - oh, and held an incredible 5 mega bytes of data! And if you wanted your program to run fast, you wrote in assembler language because compilers (forget interpreted languages) produced pretty poor code. And you just filled in a mystery for me. Most computer languages only used the first 72 characters of the card, leaving the last 8 for a sequence number so you could put the cards into a mechanical sorter if you ever dropped them. I always wondered where the 72 came from. Minor correction though: IBM's first CRT was the 2260, which had 12 lines of 40 characters. It was a big improvement when the 3270 came out with 24 lines of 80 characters. They later produced a version that would display up to 132 characters (printer width). Yes, I had a Vic-20 with it's casette tape storage. I quickly upgraded to the Commodore 64. Before the Vic-20, I used a Radio Shack TRS-80 to produce at-home banking.

/*Nancy*/

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ *From:* Earl Miles

On 10/8/2010 11:47 AM, nan wich wrote:

...

@Gerhard: 80 lines was how long a punch card was. What a ridiculous reason to use 80 any more. Are you even old enough to have ever seen a punch card? I almost forgot, the original IBM System/3 had punch cards

Yes, Nancy, there are actually a few adults on this list. Though I doubt many of us are old enough to have actually USED a punch card, since people who did work on punch cards should be pretty close to retirement age by now.

80 characters was the common width of monitors, which descended from punch cards, but is also pretty close to the 72 character width of the common typewriter (pica, if I remember right) with standard margins. RFC 2822 imposed the limit (as a SHOULD not MUST) because many terminals failed to wrap on their own, and terminals often had 80 CPL in order to be standard. Though many terminals also had 132 or, if you were unfortunate enough to use a VIC-20 (and maybe a PET, I forget) you could get 40 CPL.

Also, RFC2822 is still in effect; if an email message is in text/plain, it is polite to go ahead and wrap at 78 per the spec. If your message is text/html then wrapping is pointless.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 08.10.2010 20:28, Dave Cohen wrote:

With markup like HTML, we consider it the job of the browser to display it correctly. Email is no different.

Email (as in text/plain) is different. It is not a markup language.

I still don't see any reason to break the lines. (Tradition not being an influence on drupal in any other area AFAIK.)

Drupal sends plain-text emails by default. Plain text mails should (in my opinion) be wrapped to 80 lines. If you want to send html-mail you need to use some contributed module. That module can undo the wrapping of the text for the html mails, if desired. Cheers, Gerhard -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkyvacoACgkQfg6TFvELooRtpgCeNfdFVHar7Bna+87m/gLAZpCU RnYAn35QWX9eNZD2wbOAlKiIBtRGX6rA =YT+D -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 11:58 AM, Gerhard Killesreiter <gerhard@killesreiter.de> wrote:

Drupal sends plain-text emails by default. Plain text mails should (in my opinion) be wrapped to 80 lines. If you want to send html-mail you need to use some contributed module. That module can undo the wrapping of the text for the html mails, if desired.

For the record, drupal is actually following RFC 3676, a specific method of sending plain text e-mails (format=flowed; delsp=yes). so (sadly) it's not just Gerhard's opinion :p --mark

On Friday 08 October 2010, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:

On 08.10.2010 20:28, Dave Cohen wrote:

...

With markup like HTML, we consider it the job of the browser to display it correctly. Email is no different.

Email (as in text/plain) is different. It is not a markup language.

...

I still don't see any reason to break the lines. (Tradition not being an influence on drupal in any other area AFAIK.)

Drupal sends plain-text emails by default. Plain text mails should (in my opinion) be wrapped to 80 lines. If you want to send html-mail you need to use some contributed module. That module can undo the wrapping of the text for the html mails, if desired.

I would like to see an option on wrapping text email, perhaps in hook_mail. Reason is that I sometimes use email for automated use, the recipient is a script, not a human and wrapping would be a pain. I have no problem with wrapping being the default ;-) Perhaps it can be done with hook_email_alter(), haven't tried that yet, I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

Cheers, Gerhard

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