Can we abandon the hard-wrap policy going forward?

[mc776]

I was looking at some recent commits and there's just so much more clutter in the diffs because I kept trying to re-wrap everything (only to realize afterwards we were told to aim for 72 not 80).

The additional clutter makes it harder to tell what exactly has been changed in a block of text, for a tradeoff that... well, nobody's told me who this benefits:

Our ultimate product for all this code is a Web page, which famously does not do any of the things that hard wrapping is designed to do.

Is anyone currently involved with the website actually using anything that can't do a soft wrap when a line would go out of the text area?

[mc776]

Trying to find where these 72s and 80s and whatever even come from gives me these:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4297574/do-i-need-to-wrap-email-messages-longer-than-72-characters-in-a-line
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4m2kp7/where_does_the_72_column_linewrap_convention_come/ (most responses on this one are uselessly speculative and confabulatory)
https://talk.commonmark.org/t/default-line-break-handling-is-inconvenient/280?page=2
https://martin-ueding.de/posts/hard-vs-soft-line-wrap/

and this, which is pretty much the point I want to make here:
https://www.arp242.net/email-wrapping.html
(except, ironically, if you click "view source" the underlying text is also hard wrapped.)

[selliott512]

Let me think about it a bit. I do it, but I could probably do some more research into the pros and cons. You can certainly continue doing it as you currently are.