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Comment by yyyk | Hacker News Reader

Plain text is plainly unusable for a significant amount of people. Mobile? Have fun with a small font size to accommodate 80 chars. Ultra-wide? Same flowing problems. Right to Left language? Learn to 'work' with zero-width characters or you're SOL. Want to give more data to screen readers (sometimes the table is actually a table)? Hah.

Some people need to understand there are more use cases to email than mailing lists and that the 90s aren't coming back.

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80 char wrapping is solved by format=flowed. However none of the popular providers seem to implement it.

Yes, a lot of the “problems” of plain text boil down to poor authoring/rendering tools.

On the other hand, humanity would probably be better served by moving toward semantic representation instead of fiddling in the deck over txt vs html.

Changing the content type to include format=flowed means you're not sending plain text anymore. The content is some lightweight markup that's compatible with renderers that only understand plain text. This may seem pedantic, but it leads to real-world usability issues when folks with noncompliant MUAs quote or forward your flowed email; noncompliant meaning compliant with every standard except the one RFC that introduces format=flowed that isn't linked by the other RFCs one follows when writing an MUA, which makes sense since this is a one-off hack introduced by Eudora engineers and haphazardly implemented by some desktop clients.

In short, I completely agree with you.

> Mobile? Have fun with a small font size to accommodate 80 chars.

Whoever said the column width has to be 80 chars everywhere?

Not uncommonly, the provider/program through which the email was sent.

It's really amusing how people addicted to rich text assume plain text suffers the same limitations.

Then it will just contain extra line breaks, but the mobile MUA reading it will reflow it just fine.

If your display device can't even handle 80 column monospaced text then you need another display device.

There is nothing special about a smart phone that should prevent the display of the most basic format there is. The problem is with the email client...

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