[erlang-questions] Announcing Erlang.org Code of Conduct

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 20/03/2015, at 2:22 am, Anthony Ramine <n.oxyde@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
> Why is your window so large that my message is uncomfortable? Why waste the screen estate if you want it to show short lines? Want short lines? Have a narrow window.

My eyesight is not what it used to be.
Sometimes I have to make things bigger to see details.
It's a pain in the arse to have to keep changing the
window size.
(This is also why I find reading e-mail on a phone
unimaginable, no matter what the length of the lines.)

If I am looking at mail, I could use the *whole* of
the screen and it would not be in any sense "wasted".

>> Especially tables.
> 
> Eh? Prose will look good when reflowed under LaTeX algorithms. Why mention tables when I'm comparing LaTeX to mails in the context of reading prose?

You don't sound as if you have much experience with TeX.
The big difference between TeX and Word is that when TeX
is about to produce poor output, it *tells* you.  That's
what "underfull box" and "overfull box" are about.
If your prose has long technical terms or embedded chunks
of code you can expect a problem every few pages.
Fix it for A4, and you WILL have to fix it again for US.

Why mention tables?  Because this is the first time
anyone has mentioned 'prose'.  I thought we were talking
about e-mail.  I've often received e-mail containing
tables, and I've sent e-mail containing tables.

Just today in a lecture I reflowed something for the
sake of a student with worse eyesight than mine, and
the line breaks were *horrible*.

Above all, e-mail in a group devoted to a programming
language will often contain "text" lines that are
actually code.

> No, your own mail client doesn't use any combination of encoding and content type that let the text reflow, hence why it looks bad on my phone, and just losing screen estate on my computer. [2]

No, my own e-mail client *does* reflow, all the time.
It's listed in the format=flowed FAQ as ones of the
ones that supports f=f.
> 
> Yes there is something that stops my mobile mail reader from re-breaking your paragraphs: your very email forbids it through its Content-Transfer-Encoding and Content-Type. Just look at the raw email you sent.

I'm seeing

Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset=windows-1252
...
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

The character set I use is in fact *NOT* Windows-1252.
"7bit" means that what I'm sending
"is all represented as short lines of US-ASCII data".
It says NOTHING about whether the receiver may reflow it.

As for Content-Type: text/plain,
"The primary subtype, "plain", indicates plain (unformatted)
text.  No special software is required to get the full
meaning of the text, aside from support for the indicated
character set."
Again, this says that fancy formatting is not REQUIRED
"to get the full meaning"; it says NOTHING about whether
reflowing is ALLOWED.

If your MUA doesn't reflow to fit your phone,
that's a choice of its designers, NOT something
forced by these headers.