I wrote,
Tim indented the word "subscribe" when he sent his post but somewhere between his keyboard and my screen, the indentation was eaten by something beyond his control or mine. ... The same thing is happening to Kevin's list maintainers.
Tim objected, | You're only assuming that it's the same thing. No, you're only assuming that they can't be. In my viewpoint, the two are the same. | Kevin's chief problem | is not indentation, it's that their internal mail system forces | line-breaks at 72 characters. Your mail system is not forcing line | breaks. No argument there. But where you see two symptoms, I see one disease. Your text as delivered was so different from what you had typed that the intent was masked; I had to figure it out by seeing that the formatting conflicted with the meanings of the words. Their text as delivered is so different from what they type that the intent is masked; Kevin has to figure it out by seeing that the formatting conflicts with the meanings of the words. That's what I call "the same thing." | Q.E.D. the problem they are having is not the same as the one | you just witnessed. QED, what we just witnessed with the lost indentation on your earlier post is the same annoyance as Kevin's users are experiencing with the imposed line breaks: software outside the sender's control (or selection) that cavalierly reformats text in ways that end up masking the sender's intention. You see one problem of software that removes desired indentation and another of software that inserts undesired line breaks; I see a single one of overruling the sender's specific needs with the software author's general formatting preferences in an arrogant or narrow assumption that (s)he knows how to present the sender's writing -- without knowing who the sender will be or what (s)he will be saying -- better than the sender does. In my view, the indentation matter and the line break trouble are not two unrelated issues; it should be one project to put some reins on automated reformatting. On the other hand, Tim also wrote, addresing Richard Ball, | I understood his message to say they were already putting X-Commands | in the body. So did I.