Re: Spelling and Grammar in our e-mails

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 14:35 -0500 3/10/03, Robert Cohen wrote:
> As you can see from Julie's reply*, putting the brackets
> around the link makes no difference.  The message is
> being broken at about 68 characters or so regardless.
>
> The same thing happens to my messages.
That's not the point. In a properly constructed e-mail program, when
it sees the first bracket, <, it ignores any line breaks until it
finds the second bracket, >, which signals the end of an embedded
instruction. Of course the program also has to see one of the code
words that it knows to look for, like http, or mailto, or https, or
whatever, before it recognizes the string as an embedded instruction
(and, at least in my e-mail program, turns the type blue. Whenever
the program sees the proper code word, it makes everything following
that blue, until it reaches a blank space or a line break., which it
interprets as the end of the instruction. What the brackets, <>. do
is to suppress the interpretaion of a line break as the end of the
instruction--that is, when the e-mail application developers give a
damn about the convenience of the user.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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