Mailing List Etiquette was freebsd vs. netbsd

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 16 Jun 2020 14:11:46 +0200, Chris Knipe wrote:
> >
> >
> > While this is true in general, one should always keep in
> > mind not to confuse change with improvement: "newer" does
> > not magically imply "better", so educated human judgement
> > is always welcome.
> >
> 
> That is your opinion, and you're entitled to it.  Frankly, I am -very-
> happy we have moved past 76 character width limitations, [...]

This I can definitely agree with - advancement in time _and_
improvement.

While it doesn't mean anything technical for the message
to have short or long text lines, it's the MUAs task to
present them to the user in a way that the user wishes.
Remember it never was a limitation: you could send mails
with long lines from the beginning, it was a _suggestion_
due to terminal width and addition of quoting levels
(see term "comb quotes" for possible unwanted results).



> [...] and text based
> emails with crappy fonts.

I don't understand this. It's rather the other way round
when you have HTML-based emails that force a specific
unreadable font face and font size, and your MUA cannot
be configured for a bigger minimum font size. In text
mails, it's the _MUA's_ responsibility to offer the best
font that the user (!) desires; in text-based MUAs, this
responsibility is moved to the terminal emulator. Luckily,
both GUI MUAs and terminals today offer you to change the
font to whatever you want - and this option has been there
for decades. This is, in my opinion, not a problem with
the mail (being text), but wuth the MUA (using unusable
fonts and settings).

Fonts are not a matter of normal text email.

They _can_ be a problem with HTML email.

(I won't discuss in how far a mail client is supposed to
contain a HTML rendering engine, epsecially in the absence
of normal multipart "text _and_ HTML" mail generation.)





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...