Created attachment 610038[details][diff][review]
patch for Thunderbird
+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #368758 +++
The pref editor.quotesPreformatted was introduced as a "temporary" hack for bug 69638. It's used in two places:
* nsHTMLEditor::InsertAsPlaintextQuotation()
if somehow set True, puts reply-quotes inside a <pre> rather than
a <span> in the plain-text editor. No visible effect in the compose window,
but requires an extra rule in HTML.CSS to colorize the pre[_moz_quote].
* nsPlainTextSerializer::Write()
if True, may cause a bypass of the "no intelligent wrapping" section of the
DOM-to-Text conversion of the plain-text editor's buffer into a message,
thereby preventing quotes from being wrapped -- the same behavior seen when
the pref is turned off and the quote is contained within a <span>.
The pref is set to False by default; I seriously doubt anyone still uses this for anything. I gather it was desirable when there was some other, harder-to-deal-with problem in the editor's behavior within a <pre>, but that's obsolete now. This pref and the code supporting it is all cruft, and should be removed.
xref bug 233705 -- the pref discussed at that bug also "bypasses the 'no intelligent wrapping'" DOM-to-text conversion.