Re: OT: Top Posting

From	Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org>
Newsgroups	linux.debian.user
Subject	Re: OT: Top Posting
Date	2024-05-15 16:50 +0200
Message-ID	<IEo77-dxkA-3@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
References	(5 earlier) <IE0et-dip1-5@gated-at.bofh.it> <IE0Rb-diBU-1@gated-at.bofh.it> <IE10R-diUl-1@gated-at.bofh.it> <IE1Nf-djau-9@gated-at.bofh.it> <IEnb4-dwLY-7@gated-at.bofh.it>
Organization	linux.* mail to news gateway

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On Wed, May 15, 2024 at 09:46:08AM -0400, Cindy Sue Causey wrote:
> Best as I was able to discern from the Net [0], 72 characters is the
> magic number for line length because 4 extra characters are added to
> both ends when e.g. git processes submissions. Makes good common sense
> to me.
> 
> PS I thought it was 80. Guess it was about those extra 8 characters.

For many decades, there was an industry standard that lines of text
should be up to 80 characters wide.  Punch cards were 80 characters wide,
for example.  I don't know whether punch cards were the *first* place
it appeared, but they're the first I'm aware of.

A lot of the printers from the last century allowed 80 characters
per line on standard US 8.5x11 inch paper.  I'm not sure if teletypes
used 80-column paper, or 133-column paper (green bar), or a mixture.

Later, we got terminals.  A typical ASCII terminal (a physical one, like
a DEC VT-100) is 80x24 characters, or sometimes 80x25.  The 80-character
line standard continued.

When hardware evolved and most of us started using X11 or similar GUI
interfaces, terminal emulators became the norm.  xterm and other software
terminal emulators use an 80x24 window as the default, for compatibility
with physical terminals.

When writing code in most programming languages, there are style guides
that still suggest sticking to 80-character lines whenever possible.
It avoids line wrapping when being read in an 80-character terminal,
and besides that, really long lines of code are harder to read than
shorter lines.

When it comes to email or Usenet, though, the 72-character suggestion
is meant to allow a bit of room for quoting markup.  If I write a
79-character line of text, and then you reply to it with "> " in front,
the resulting 81-character line of text either gets wrapped or truncated.
Limiting yourself to 72-character lines allows a few levels of quoting
before the text becomes unreadable.

This is why the 72-character limit is just a suggestion, not a hard
requirement.  If you write lines that are 74 characters wide, probably
nobody's going to care.  The goal is simply to make it easy to carry
on a conversation.

Thread

Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-13 22:20 +0200
  Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Geert Stappers <stappers@stappers.nl> - 2024-05-13 22:30 +0200
  Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2024-05-13 22:30 +0200
    Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 13:20 +0200
  Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs jeremy ardley <jeremy.ardley@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 00:50 +0200
    Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 13:20 +0200
      Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs jeremy ardley <jeremy.ardley@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 13:40 +0200
        Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2024-05-14 13:50 +0200
          Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs jeremy ardley <jeremy.ardley@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 14:00 +0200
            Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 19:30 +0200
          Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 14:00 +0200
            Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 15:20 +0200
              Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 15:30 +0200
              OT: Top Posting (was: Dovecot correct ownership for logs) "Loris Bennett" <loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de> - 2024-05-14 16:00 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting (was: Dovecot correct ownership for logs) Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 16:10 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting gene heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2024-05-14 17:00 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 17:10 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting Jeffrey Walton <noloader@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 21:00 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting Larry Martell <larry.martell@gmail.com> - 2024-05-15 00:30 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting fxkl47BF@protonmail.com - 2024-05-14 19:10 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2024-05-14 19:50 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting "James H. H. Lampert" <jamesl@touchtonecorp.com> - 2024-05-14 20:00 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting Nicolas George <george@nsup.org> - 2024-05-14 20:20 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting Karen Lewellen <klewellen@shellworld.net> - 2024-05-14 20:40 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2024-05-14 21:40 +0200
                Markup in mail messages (was: Re: OT: Top Posting) Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> - 2024-05-15 04:20 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages eben@gmx.us - 2024-05-15 05:40 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages Darac Marjal <mailinglist@darac.org.uk> - 2024-05-15 17:00 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages David <curmudgeon@telaman.net.au> - 2024-05-15 20:50 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2024-05-16 15:30 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2024-05-16 15:50 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages Henning Follmann <hfollmann@itcfollmann.com> - 2024-05-16 16:00 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2024-05-17 21:30 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages Henning Follmann <hfollmann@itcfollmann.com> - 2024-05-17 23:20 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> - 2024-05-18 05:40 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2024-05-18 07:50 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> - 2024-05-16 19:00 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages Karl Vogel <vogelke@pobox.com> - 2024-05-17 05:50 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> - 2024-05-17 07:50 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2024-05-17 13:20 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> - 2024-05-18 15:30 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2024-05-18 15:50 +0200
                Re: Markup in mail messages Curt <curty@free.fr> - 2024-05-16 17:10 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting debian-user@howorth.org.uk - 2024-05-14 21:40 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting Cindy Sue Causey <butterflybytes@gmail.com> - 2024-05-15 16:40 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting Nicolas George <george@nsup.org> - 2024-05-15 17:00 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting gene heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2024-05-15 20:10 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting "Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@einval.com> - 2024-05-14 20:30 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net> - 2024-05-14 23:20 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting fxkl47BF@protonmail.com - 2024-05-14 23:40 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting Cindy Sue Causey <butterflybytes@gmail.com> - 2024-05-15 15:50 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting Nicolas George <george@nsup.org> - 2024-05-15 16:10 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting gene heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2024-05-15 16:50 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2024-05-15 16:50 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting Henning Follmann <hfollmann@itcfollmann.com> - 2024-05-15 18:10 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting "James H. H. Lampert" <jamesl@touchtonecorp.com> - 2024-05-15 18:50 +0200
                Re: OT: Top Posting (was: Dovecot correct ownership for logs) <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2024-05-14 17:30 +0200
              Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Henning Follmann <hfollmann@itcfollmann.com> - 2024-05-14 16:00 +0200
                Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 20:50 +0200
              Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Alain D D Williams <addw@phcomp.co.uk> - 2024-05-14 17:40 +0200
                Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Nicolas George <george@nsup.org> - 2024-05-14 17:50 +0200
        Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2024-05-14 13:50 +0200
  Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2024-05-14 06:40 +0200
    Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 13:40 +0200
      Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs tomas@tuxteam.de - 2024-05-14 13:50 +0200
        Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr> - 2024-05-14 14:10 +0200
        Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs tomas@tuxteam.de - 2024-05-14 14:20 +0200
          Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs jeremy ardley <jeremy.ardley@gmail.com> - 2024-05-15 00:50 +0200
            Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-15 12:30 +0200
              Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs jeremy ardley <jeremy.ardley@gmail.com> - 2024-05-15 12:40 +0200
                Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-15 13:00 +0200
                Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs jeremy ardley <jeremy.ardley@gmail.com> - 2024-05-15 13:00 +0200
              Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Henning Follmann <hfollmann@itcfollmann.com> - 2024-05-15 14:00 +0200
                Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-16 13:10 +0200
                Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Henning Follmann <hfollmann@itcfollmann.com> - 2024-05-16 14:40 +0200
                Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-17 10:20 +0200
                Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2024-05-17 14:30 +0200
                Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Henning Follmann <hfollmann@itcfollmann.com> - 2024-05-17 14:30 +0200
                Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-18 15:20 +0200
        Re: Dovecot correct ownership for logs Richard <rrosner5@gmail.com> - 2024-05-14 14:20 +0200

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