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From: "William Blunn" <bill--cygwin AT tao-group DOT com>
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
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Subject: Re: Wrapping long lines (Was Re: FAQ update suggestion for "I'm having basic problems with find. Why?")
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004 12:30:04 +0100
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> > I only wish that I could go back in time and show the inventor of <PRE>
> > the havoc they have wreaked by making it turn off wrapping by default.
> 
> I'm pretty sure you were joking here but if not...

Actually I was serious.

> That's the whole point of PRE, that it *doesn't* wrap.

I don't think that is the whole point of PRE.

I think the whole point of PRE is that newlines and other whitespace in
the HTML source are interpreted literally.

It appears that the design committee took it a step too far and decided
that newlines in the rendered version of PRE can ONLY appear as a result
of newlines in the source.

This is counter to the normal behaviour nearly everywhere else in which
text wraps when it hits the edge of the medium.

> It's for text that's been preformatted, with linefeeds and spacing
> already determined.  If PRE were to mangle the text by wrapping it at
> some margin, it would totally defeat the purpose of the tag.

If the "pre-formatted" text is too wide to fit the medium, then
*something* has got to give somewhere.

There has got to be *some* behaviour.

Wrapping is a well-established and convenient way of doing this.

Establishing a second (horizontal) scrolling domain is just plain
hostile for text documents.

> What really needs to be improved is mhonarc or whatever app is used to
> make the web archives.  It should detect when the message contains no
> linebreaks and not use PRE but rather let the browser render it as
> normal text, so that it will be wrapped to the width of the screen as
> intended.

Sounds good to me, and also pretty much the response from my co-worker
when I described the problem to him.

His response was basically that the system should look at the message it
is attempting to render as HTML and if all sequences of non-newlines are
80 characters or less, then use <PRE>, and if not, then use alternative
formatting which allows for wrapping, e.g. <TT> with newline processing.

Bill
-- 
William Blunn <bill at tao-group dot com>
Tao, 62/63 Suttons Business Park, Earley, Reading, RG6 1AZ, UK
Tel: +44 845 644 4458, Fax: +44 845 644 4459, Web: http://tao-group.com/

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