[Email-SIG] header folding

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

R. David Murray writes:

 > the end.  Basically, BaseHeader gets a 'wrap' method, and there is
 > a new policy control, 'refold_source' (I'll probably rename it to
 > 'rewrap_source', since I expect to apply it also to message
 > bodies).

This bothers me.  Folding and wrapping are two different things.

Folding is about invertibly reformatting a single logical line to make
machines happy during transmission, what wrapping "does" is not 100%
clear to me but it's about making people happy.  (I put "does" in
quotes because it's not obvious to me that the source of wrapped text
necessarily is a single anything, nor that wrapping need be
invertible.)

I grant that people and many MUAs take a different point of view about
header folding, but clearly the RFCs have moved away from placing any
importance on presentation aspects toward specifying an invertible
transformation exactly.  On the other hand, I think that wrapping
should place emphasis on presentation.