[Tango-L] Tech entreaty: Please care how your post is published; or your stats..

[Victor Bennetts]

Thank you Igor for putting me onto such a facinating issue. Here I was expecting to Google a quick fix but instead stumbled onto layers and layers of debate and standards. To say this is not a browser problem is strictly correct but a gross over-simplification. As I understand it (I am not a web developer or mail administrator) the lines don't wrap because the archiver program that formats the plain text messages for pythia wraps them in <pre> tags. This is signalling that the message is preformatted text and hence is not to be formatted and wrapped (the default behavour I believe). Apparently there is a way to get Outlook to insert line feeds at a specified character length for you, so I will look into that Monday and post it.  That is the quick work around, but I see this as an arbitrary mangling of the message. And adding line feeds manually seem so seventies. I see this as really a mail archiver issue. The archiver should be smart enough to recognize text that consists of long lines and either break it up or, much better still, wrap it in different more appropriate tags. There is a lively debate over whether to manually input carriage returns, an issue as controvertial as followers unwinding after the cross ;-). The quick quick fix is just to cut and paste the long message into wordpad or word and it will reformat fine.

Here is a really good article on the background to the problem and ways in which various standards bodies attempt to solve it (actually a really interesting site about email formatting in general):
http://mailformat.dan.info/body/linelength.html

Here is one guy's defence of long lines:
http://www.tnlc.com/eep/wrap.html
Here is some background on the relevant html:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html

Anyway, sorry for the offtopic (somewhat) post and for the unreadable messages (including this one ;-))

P.S. As anyone who works in IT will tell you, never trust a developer, just love and abuse them :-).

Igor wrote>It is not a browser problem. No browser will ever wrap the HTML text in a
window.

**************** CAUTION - Disclaimer *****************
This e-mail contains PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION intended solely for the use of the addressee(s). If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender by e-mail and delete the original message. Further, you are not to copy, disclose, or distribute this e-mail or its contents to any other person and any such actions are unlawful. This e-mail may contain viruses. Infosys has taken every reasonable precaution to minimize this risk, but is not liable for any damage you may sustain as a result of any virus in this e-mail. You should carry out your own virus checks before opening the e-mail or attachment. Infosys reserves the right to monitor and review the content of all messages sent to or from this e-mail address. Messages sent to or from this e-mail address may be stored on the Infosys e-mail system.
***INFOSYS******** End of Disclaimer ********INFOSYS***