Here we have a collision of methods that in my opinion worked well
in the past (ASCII text, each line limited to 72 chars or so), vs.
"modern" technology (text composition on a word processor).
The problem with "let the reader do the line wrapping" is - what if
the person reading does not USE the same level of technology that the
person writing depended upon. I am writing this message in a "dumb
editor", not a "word processor". If all the messages that I reply to
contained CR only after each paragraph, I would have to get rid of
my editor (it _is_ that dumb!), yet this editor serves me perfectly
well with mail messages that *do* conform with RFC822 guidelines.
Two personal examples of difficulty with mail in "modern" formats:
- One thing I hate is "paragraph wrapping". Someone sent a multi-
hundred line article to a newsgroup. On my Yarn screen it just
looked like line after line after line - hard to read, hard to
make sense of. I sent a message to the author, asking why that
format. Apparently his word processor automatically puts spaces
between paragraphs, etc., but he did not know the "incantation"
to make it produce formatted (rather than "squashed text") mail.
- One member of a group I belong to keeps sending out HTML-format
mail. Yes, I do have Yarn set up so I can call (via metamail)
a program to display HTML, but that takes time and disrupts my
"message reading flow". The result is that I usually "skip"
this member's messages - in my opinion the extra time to switch
programs just to "decode" typographic formats is not worth it.
mikus