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 Administrative / General / 8188
8187  |  8189
Subject: 
Re: line breaks in my messages, why does this happen ?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.publish
Date: 
Tue, 24 Oct 2000 20:39:20 GMT
Viewed: 
923 times
  
[reposted with corrections]


In lugnet.admin.general, Ben Gatrelle writes:
Doesn't the server do it because you have told it WRAP=HARD.

Is that a delcarative or interrogative statement?  :-)

No, the client (web browser) is doing the line breaking.  The WRAP=HARD
attribute of <TEXTAREA> asks the web browser client to wrap the user's text
at the COLS=n margin *before* sending it to the server.  And I just double-
checked in the raw incoming posting form logs for the relevant URLs below to
make sure that this is the case here -- it's not breaking the lines on the
server end.


I think I have
always had this problem posting URLs from the Web interface even before you
did your preview posting change. I post about 95% through the web interface.

We could try using WRAP=SOFT and let the server line-wrap the lines after it
receives them.  (It only wraps them if he client didn't honor the wrap
request.)  WRAP=SOFT asks your browser to show you text as if it was wrapped
(you see wrapped text) but sends it to the server unwrapped.  The danger here
of course is that the wrapping algorithm on the client might differ from the
server.  However, since the server just uses a simple "break only when
absolutely necessary past 80 and never break a word," it's doubtful that any
real problems would come up.  You'd probably see it in the preview too.
BUT--when the server breaks a line that's more than 80 characters wide, it
does the breaking at column 76 or earlier, for cleaner lines.  That is, it
won't break a line at 79 or 78 or 77 unless it has to (like if you have a
77-character-long URL).


Here is a web-interface post from June where the line break was automatically
entered at the ? in the URL <http://news.lugnet.com/market/auction/?n=6089>

That would be happening at the client side.  But I'll check the raw incoming
form logs...  OK, ya, your web client (browser) sent it line-broken after
the ? in the URL for some strange reason probably only Bill Gates knows.  :-)


This post was broken at the 79th character and was sent in through email
<http://news.lugnet.com/market/auction/?n=6123>

In my opinion, that is a godawful evil bug in your email client.  Hmm...It
says it was mailed using "Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0)".
Is there a newer version without the wrapping bug?  Had you asked your mail
client to break lines like that?  Maybe it has an option to shut the forced
breaking off.  The email client broke a word into two words! -- this time not
even at a punctuation character.  That's pretty bad -- you should report that
to your software vendor and ask them to fix it.  (Send yourself an equivalent
mail first of course to verify it in case I'm wrong.  :-)


Here is a test post I just did through the web-intterface showing broken
URLs.  <http://news.lugnet.com/off-topic/test/?n=2388>

I use IE5.x for my browser and Outlook 2000 for mail.

That's evil.  OK, MSIE isn't handling WRAP=HARD the same was Netscape and
Mozilla handle it.

Let's try this:  I'll have the server send out WRAP=SOFT if it your browser
identifies itself as "MSIE" in its user-agent string, otherwise it'll send
out WRAP=HARD as normal.

Is that better now or worse?  It should be better, and you should be able
to post your long eBay URLs now.

--Todd

p.s.  Man, there sure are a lot of webpages and discussion out there (elsewhere
on the web/internet) talking about whether to use WRAP=HARD, WRAP=PHYSCIAL,
or WRAP=SOFT, etc...  Darn browser wars.  :-(

Here's a great page, BTW -- one for the bookmarks!...
http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/forms/textarea.html

What does your browser do with the "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"
example when you click View?



Message has 2 Replies:
  Re: line breaks in my messages, why does this happen ?
 
(...) It is a retorical interrogative statement of what I thought was the truth. ;) Apparently it is not truth, though... (...) I'll look into this. I don't believe I have any settig for length of a line. (...) I just launched my Netscape navigator (...) (24 years ago, 24-Oct-00, to lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.publish)
  Re: line breaks in my messages, why does this happen ?
 
In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman writes: <snip> (...) Todd, Is it possible (or desireable) that this 3-way choice could be implemented in the lugnet user profile area ? This would require the user to be logged in (as well as understanding the (...) (24 years ago, 26-Oct-00, to lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.publish)

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