On 2025-03-07 10:08:23 +0000 (+0000), Jonathan Dowland wrote:
On Thu Mar 6, 2025 at 7:08 AM GMT, Henrik Ahlgren wrote:> It is essential to have a method for distinguishing between hard > and soft newlines if you want to reflow text properly.Agreed! And, as Jeremy Stanley points out in another msg, this is not *quite* what format=flowed promises.
Eh, it's pretty close though. The gist is that a <space><linebreak> sequence is meant to represent a soft line break, while <linebreak> not preceded by <space> is a regular hard line break. (Whether <linebreak> is <CR><LF> or bare <LF> depends on whether you're considering it at the SMTP layer or MUA/editor of course.)
My earlier message was more contesting the suggestion that absence of a soft line break implies the line should not be *wrapped* into multiple shorter lines by the client (i.e. the preformatted text case), which is incorrect; rather it means that line should not be logically *combined* with the next (treat it as a hard line break).
So it basically does provide a means of encoding the soft vs. hard line break distinction, it's just that soft and hard line breaks don't tell you what can be wrapped, they tell you what can be combined. The underlying assumption is that every line can be wrapped, but not all lines can be combined. This is also at the heart of the lack of suitability for preformatted text, e.g. inline patch diffs.
Maybe part of the confusion is that some of us define the term "line wrapping" differently?
-- Jeremy Stanley
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