[Python-Dev] Mail archive line wrapping (Was: Import and unicode: part two)

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:23:31 -0500
James Y Knight <foom at fuhm.net> wrote:
> > 
> > I think most mail readers are able to word-wrap raw text correctly
> > (even though it still makes your messages look bad amongst a thread of
> > nicely-formatted 80-column messages).
> > The real annoyance is when reading Web archives of mailing-lists, e.g.
> > http://twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-python/2011-January/023346.html
> 
> Well, yes, that's a pretty annoying bug in mailman, isn't it? If only anyone around here was involved in mailman and could fix it! :) [I've attempted to cc this to mailman-users with this message, but since I'm not subscribed I dunno if it'll make it or not.]

Why is this a bug in mailman? Mailman archives messages as they are
sent (well, perhaps it mangles e-mail addresses, perhaps). If someone
draws a nice ASCII-art diagram which requires 90 columns instead of 80,
you wouldn't want the archive to break its rendering.

So, it's really the mail client (or its user :-)) which should handle
word-wrapping, not some downstream tool which has no idea of the
original intent.

> I have this in my user CSS override file to fix the issue for myself globally on all such archives out in the world:
> /* Mailing list archives */
> html>body>pre { white-space: pre-wrap !important; }

That doesn't wrap to 80 characters, does it? Only whatever the
current window/container width is, which isn't necessarily the right
thing (if that makes lines 160 characters long, it's still quite
uncomfortable to read).

Regards

Antoine.