Re: Spelling and Grammar in our e-mails

[Robert Cohen <Robert.Cohen@PO-BOX.ESU.EDU>]

At 14:35 -0500 3/10/03, I 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.

to which Hugh Haskell replied:

> That's not the point.

On the contrary, I believe that is precisely the point, as you
point out later in your message.  

> 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.

Those of us following this thread understand the use of brackets.
However, as you finally state at the end, if you don't have a good
e-mail application, it doesn't matter what you do.  People can go ahead
and chastise Julie for neglecting the brackets (and make her fear
posting in the future) but I don't think there is anything she
can do about it.

...or at least I don't think there is anything SIMPLE she can do about
it.

In the meantime, let's learn how to cut and paste.
____________________________________________
Robert Cohen; rcohen@po-box.esu.edu; 570-422-3428; http://www.esu.edu/~bbq
Physics, East Stroudsburg Univ., E. Stroudsburg, PA 18301