And let's not forget where else where the text may end up later.

I'm sure this message was fine in their mail reader:

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/manet/current/msg11520.... (chosen only b/c I was reading through the list this morning)

But now I must horizontally scroll :(

To be fair, thats a problem with the way browsers render anything inside the <pre> tag. If anything, it is an example of what people should do, not force unnecessary restrictions on the way they write text. Lest you might end up with:

    > This is a short paragraph that I am quoting that 
    > someone
    > else sent to me.

Emacs has spoiled me. As soon as I saw your post, I felt a weird tingling urge to press M-q and fix it.

Indeed. We can fix all these systems... or stay at 72 columns.

Or door 3: Let bad software stay bad, use good software instead and format our text naturally. If somebody chooses to use software that can't wrap text, that's fine for them personally — but I shouldn't have to deal with their artificial limitations.

Right-click, Inspect Element `white-space: normal`

No more scrolling.

The problem is with the way the archive web site decided to render this text.

From a web standpoint, the author of this email did the right thing: introduce very little formatting (only paragraph breaks) and leave it up to style sheets to render his text the way the reader wants it.

That's how you get the same text to render perfectly on a twenty column display (e.g. an old phone), a 30' inch monitor and everything in-between.

Introducing manual newlines at arbitrary points (e.g. 80 columns) is a bad practice that assumes that everyone will read your text on the same device.

Relevant explanation:

http://beust.com/weblog/2009/03/10/of-kindle-and-web-usabili...

Don't you mean:

  > Exactly. That's why you write it to the lowest common denominator, so
  > that everyone can use it well.

Reads great!

I didn't say that all text ever should always be 72 columns in length. A git commit message and a Hacker News comment are used in completely different ways.

Also, I probably would have moved the ', so' to the next line, so that it reads a bit better.

Agreed: re: making sure that everyone can use it well, but targeting LCD will break newer devices sometimes. As far as I can tell, using linebreaks for linebreaks will give you readable output on the widest variety of devices.