Bug#610703: bug webpages should use white-space: pre-wrap
On Jan 21, 2011, at 8:21 PM, Don Armstrong wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Jan 2011, James Y Knight wrote:
>> Also, changing the style to "pre-wrap" won't normally have any impact at all on hard-wrapped mail, since user's browser windows aren't generally < 80 columns wide. So it seems to me like a no-lose change to make to the CSS.
>
> It's perfectly legitimate to send very long lines which should not be wrapped. We have quite a few examples where this is the case, which is why I won't set that CSS element for all messages.
Essentially all other mail archive software now tells the browsers to soft-wrap long lines: pipermail (only as of mailman 2.1.13 or later), mhonarc used by lists.debian.org (forever, afaict), and gmane, at least. Works fine there...I can't see any advantage for having a horizontal scrollbar instead of letting the browser word-wrap. So, I'd say there is no circumstance when it is appropriate to have the lines run on past the edge of the browser window. Simply always tell it wrap to the window width, just like everyone else is doing.
Furthermore, every mail client I know of also word wraps at the window width (but surely you can find some example of one that doesn't).
However, it's not worth it to me to argue further. I've already had it solved for myself for over a year by adding this to my browsers' user-CSS file, (added to workaround the issue with older mailman installations, but works for debbugs too):
html>body>pre { white-space: pre-wrap !important; }
> If there's no way (besides checking out X-mailer) to determine whether we should be wrapping at some width, or just letting the lines run on, then people will just have to use less crappy mailers.
That's a good one. I'm sure everyone is going to use a different mailer so that the web archives of debian bug reports will be pretty.
James
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