Carriage Returns & Netiquitte (Was: re: Paul was Right)

>>did they happen to teach you about a little thing called a Carriage Return?
>>Joe, hit <return> once in a while, will you? :-)
>>
>I hate to clog people's mailboxes replying to this stuff, but does anybody
>but Mark have a problem reading my posts?
>
>Mark and I are going back and forth with this one in email, and I want to
>settle all doubts.
>

A quick look at 'A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community'
by Chuq Von Rospach (frequently posted to news.announce.newusers)
gives the proper Netiquette for linelength:

# Limit Line Length and Avoid Control Characters.
#
# Try to keep your text in a generic format. Many (if not most) of
# the people reading Usenet do so from 80 column terminals or from
# workstations with 80 column terminal windows. Try to keep your
# lines of text to less than 80 characters for optimal readability.
# If people quote part of your article in a followup, short lines will
# probably show up better, too.
#
# Also realize that there are many, many different forms of terminals
# in use. If you enter special control characters in your message, it
# may result in your message being unreadable on some terminal types;
# a character sequence that causes reverse video on your screen may
# result in a keyboard lock and graphics mode on someone else's
# terminal. You should also try to avoid the use of tabs, too, since
# they may also be interpreted differently on terminals other than
# your own.
#

The 'Rules for posting to Usenet' by Mark Horton (also typically found in
news.announce.newusers), has similar recommendations:

# In preparing an article, be aware that other people's machines are
# not the same as yours. The following is a list of things to keep
# in mind:
# * Keep your lines under 80 characters, and under 72 if possible (so that
# the lines won't get longer than 80 when people include them when
# responding to your postings). Most editors have a fill or format mode
# that will do this for you automatically. Make sure that it
# actually puts ("hard") newline characters into the file, rather
# than just wrapping the displayed lines on your screen.
#

On a personal note, yes, I find it a major pain in the *** to read those
bajillion character lines.

Regards,
Mike
Received on Fri Jul 25 08:02:20 1997