OE, newsgroups, and wrap (was: [VE][108] wrap="physical")

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
 
> Frank Ellerman wrote in his reply (which I cannot reply to,
> since for some odd reason, my OE treats it as if it were a
> nrwsgroup posting!)

In fact I read almost all lists including this on GMaNe, where
it is a newsgroup (GMaNe = Gateway Mail News).  I guess GMaNe
sends it out with a Newsgroups: header field.  Unfortunately
different MUAs have different ideas what this means in email,
outside of NetNews.  I'll ask on gmane.discuss what the idea
of its Newsgroups: gmane.org.w3c.validator header field is.

The IETF USEFOR WG discussed to define it, e.g., meaning "also
posted in Newsgroups: X".  If you know the USEFOR WG it won't
surprise you that there was no consensus what it really means
in email after about ten years of discussions. <sigh /> 

> Nobody really _knows_ how the different wrap attribute
> values work on different browsers, old and new.

You can hope that it either does something in the direction of
what it did on the first "popular" browser supporting it, or
has no effect at all.  Where "popular" boils down to some value
of Mosaic, Netscape, IE, or Lynx for the really old browsers.

IIRC wrap="physical" used to be relevant for Netscape 2.x/3.x,
and (speculation) I was the last Netscape 3.x user in 2007. ;-)

> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/own-dtd.html#tagsoup
> (There I declare the allowed values as "off", "soft", "hard".

http://de.selfhtml.org/html/formulare/eingabe.htm#bereiche_umbruch
claims that wrap="physical" is the same as wrap="hard" on 
NS 4.x, but works also on NS 2.x, 3.x and IE 4.x.  Maybe add
it to your homebrewn DTD for hardcore backwards compatibility.

> If you really wanted to have such behavior _and_ you wanted to
> use HTML syntax that complies with some W3C-approved doctype,
> then you would have to resort to writing a piece of JavaScript
> that imitates the desired functionality.

Ugh, replacing legacy attributes by CSS where possible is one
thing, but using JS is not very attractive.  The HTML 5 folks
apparently intend to (re)introduce wrap="hard":

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/#hard

 Frank

Received on Monday, 10 March 2008 08:13:58 UTC