[ga] Fixing long lines in the ICANN mailing list and comments archives

[George Kirikos <gkirikos@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi folks,

Some of you might have noticed that ICANN's mailing list and comments archives 
suffer from very bad formatting, e.g. note the long lines at:

http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/council/msg06291.html

where you have to scroll to the right to read a complete paragraph (tested in 
IE, Safari and Firefox to have the same bad issues).

I believe I've found the solution, as noted below (emails sent to ICANN 
Webmaster last week), which involve making appropriate changes to the MHonArc 
script settings. The actual script is not the latest version (2.6.10 instead of 
the newer 2.6.16), so it might also be wise to upgrade in case of security 
issues in the older version.

Hopefully this matter will be addressed soon, if not for all the past archives, 
at least for new posts. I'm cc'ing Robert Hoggarth of ICANN who got some 
website bugs fixed in a timely manner last week. I'm not one to withhold praise 
from those few standouts at ICANN who do perform their duties well, so kudos to 
him for a job well done.

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
http://www.leap.com/

--- On Fri, 2/6/09, George Kirikos <gkirikos@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> From: George Kirikos
> Subject: Re: Linebreaks or changed formatting for mailing list archives?
> To: webmaster@xxxxxxxxx
> Date: Friday, February 6, 2009, 1:50 PM
> Hi again,
> 
> I believe I found the solution. You're using the
> MHonArc v2.6.10 script, according to the
> "View->Source" of one of the messages. The
> appropriate solution appears to be:
> 
> http://www.mhonarc.org/MHonArc/doc/faq/mime.html#lineclip
> 
> "Can long lines be wrapped in converted
> messages?"
> 
> Yes. See the options available for the
> m2h_text_plain::filter described in the MIMEFILTERS resource
> page of the documentation. Example:
> 
> <-- Make sure lines are no longer than 80 characters
> -->
> <MIMEArgs>
> m2h_text_plain::filter; maxwidth=80
> </MIMEArgs>
> 
> By the way, according to http://www.mhonarc.org/ the latest
> version is 2.6.16, so it might be worth upgrading the
> script.
> 
> According to:
> 
> http://www.mhonarc.org/MHonArc/doc/faq/msgpgs.html#chngmesgfmt
> 
> you can also easily rebuild the archives using the
> "EDITIDX" (probably best to make backups, just in
> case things go wrong), or use "Reconvert" if you
> still have the original messages.
> 
> Hopefully these fixes would make it easier for the ICANN
> community to use the message archives.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> George
> 
> --- On Fri, 2/6/09, George Kirikos wrote:
> 
> > From: George Kirikos
> > Subject: Linebreaks or changed formatting for mailing
> list archives?
> > To: webmaster@xxxxxxxxx
> > Date: Friday, February 6, 2009, 1:28 PM
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I notice that the mailing list archives are showing an
> > increasing number of messages with very long lines, so
> that
> > one has to scroll far to the right to read each
> paragraph,
> > e.g. see the formatting:
> > 
> >
> http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/council/msg06278.html
> >
> http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/ga-200709/msg02560.html
> > 
> > I believe it's because certain email clients, even
> in
> > plain text mode, don't set a "hard
> limit" of
> > 72 characters or whatever, like many used to do in the
> past.
> > I think Yahoo recently switched their behaviour (that
> 2nd
> > link was from a Yahoo account), see the first link
> below
> > which does have the hard column limit:
> > 
> >
> http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/ga-200709/msg02540.html
> >
> http://gnso.icann.org/mailing-lists/archives/ga-200709/msg02546.html
> > 
> > 
> > Anyhow, there's obviously a script that processes
> the
> > messages before they hit the archives. You might want
> to
> > suggest to the author of the script that the body of
> > messages has appropriate <p> paragraph tags for
> each
> > paragraph, instead of using the <pre> tag:
> > 
> > http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_pre.asp
> > 
> > which ultimately causes the long lines, because it
> relies
> > on the sending email client to format things for the
> web,
> > something the email client probably was not intending.
> > 
> > Or, if they want to still use the "pre" tag,
> > using a universal style sheet might permit a maximum
> width
> > (or force the text to wrap properly on all browsers?
> > 
> > One has to be careful not to change anything that
> might
> > allow XSS attacks, etc. (perhaps that's why
> > "pre" was used?), so a stylesheet might be a
> > change that is least intrusive and can do the least
> harm.
> > The best solution would be to sanitize all emails, and
> then
> > take the pure text to be formatted cleanly, but that
> might
> > be more complex.
> > 
> > Sincerely,
> > 
> > George Kirikos
> > http://www.leap.com/