NLP (Newline Problem)

[Andy Wardley]

Chris Jack wrote:

 > Distraction is one of the tools in my parenting kit - child starts winding
 > up for mega-wobbly, parent goes - oh, look at X out the window and the child
 > (sometimes) forgets all about having the wobbly.

I think most people would agree that these kind of skills are useful. I 
suspect that the main objection people have to NLP is not the underlying 
skills or methodologies, but the all-encompassing "NLP" label that is applied 
to them. Self-hypnosis, for example, was practised long before NLP became 
fashionable. Similarly, people programmed in pairs and wrote lots of tests 
before it became "Extreme Programming" (and what a stupid name that is!)

 > Apologies in advance if I've stuffed up my line breaks again.

I always used to format my messages according to the 80 character width limit. 
  Then I started using one of the new-fangled email clients with an inbuilt 
WYSIWIG editor that hid such trivialities like line breaks from me, assuming, 
no doubt, that I was far too lazy or dumb to care about such things. 
Eventually I gave up trying to add line breaks because it was all too hard and 
frequently went wrong.

Does anyone still care about these things? It used to annoy me when people 
didn't add newlines, but now it seems that most modern and new-fangly mail 
clients handle line wrapping no problem.  So in that sense, it's probably 
better to *not* add newlines so that the recipient can set their window width 
to whatever they like and have the text wrap accordingly.

A