word wrap on the ADS-L archive

Mark A. Mandel Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM
Thu Jul 26 01:00:10 UTC 2001


Since my digest mailings appear to be lost in cyberspace I'm catching up
via the Web archive, and I have found that some postings appear there
without word wrap. For example, the following post from Barry --

>>>>>
Most of the Thorramatur gives off a smell similar to milk that's three
weeks gone bad.  This is because the meat has been preserved in mysa, which
is similar to whey, but different.  Mysa is an extremely sour by-product of
Icelandic skyr, which is sort of a low-fat yogurt.  Skr is delicious.
Mysa, however, is basically the same thing as the disgusting urine-colored
liquid that floats on the top of your yogurt when you first peel it open.
Imagine for a moment plopping bits of sheep's intestine into that sour
liquid and then, several months later, eating it.  Apparently, this was the
only way the Vikings were able to preserve their food.  Now it's a
tradition.
<<<<<

-- appears as a single line 669 characters long. This is difficult to read!

I don't blame Barry for this; he just provided a handy example. I see that
the archive uses the HTML <pre> attribute, meaning "preformatted", meaning
that the text is formatted exactly the way it appears in the file.

While I appreciate that preformatting keeps the paragraphing as the writer
intended it, surely Barry didn't intend that paragraph to be 5 feet wide by
1/6 inch high! (Can you tell I grew up with typewriters?) Can we force text
to wrap at, say, 80 or 90 characters before putting it into "<pre>" HTML?
Word wrapping is an old and well-understood technology.

-- Mark

                  Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist
            Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company
 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com



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