[Nix-dev] Can we please have text-only on this ML?

[Ertugrul Söylemez]

> My issue with text-only is that I don't know how to turn off
> hard-wrapping in my client. By ‘hard-wrapping’ I mean:

That's always something that bothered me about e-mail (among other
things).  There are only two formats that are widely supported, and none
of them get it right.  The text/plain format is too much 1980's terminal
or perhaps 1900's typewriter to be useful as a standard electronic
format, especially given our nowadays rich diversity in potential
viewing devices.  Certainly text/plain hurts on my small phone.  There
is an extension to turn wrapping off globally, but obviously that's just
desparation rather than a solution.

Also most MUAs interpret this as:  "Make the paragraphs of this message
use the entire horizontal space."  That works for phones, but
typographically it's a bad idea for a MUA displayed on a large 16:9
display, unless you make the window smaller.

On the other hand text/html is too much.  It comes with huge
implementation costs, even when you use ready-made libraries for parsing
and rendering.  It comes with an unnecessarily high potential for abuse.
If you think about it, in e-mail it is really an extremely reduced
variant of HTML to get rich text formatting and independence of the
source text layout.  These are features some of us (including me) would
like, but without the complexity of HTML.

So what we really need is something inbetween.  I would request that:

  * it can easily be typed by hand even in very poor editors, but
    especially well in advanced editors like Emacs or Vim,

  * that it can be read without rendering, so that the barrier to
    writing a new MUA does not become much worse (it's horrible enough).

  * WYSIWYG editors for it are reasonably easy to write and would render
    to readable source text,

  * it allows us to be completely independent of source text layout
    except in parts where we specifically want it,

  * it is a standard format that all agree to interpret the same way.

You may be thinking: "Except for the last point that's just Markdown!".
Indeed, a Markdown standard is currently in development as far as I'm
informed.  And I'm happy to adopt it as the standard format for email.
In fact I wouldn't be surprised if some people already configured their
MUAs to pass text/plain parts through Pandoc or something similar.
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