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Re: [Sheflug] HTML mail (was Re: Linux)
Will Newton wrote:
> On Friday 20 Sep 2002 10:47 am, Alex Hudson wrote:
>
>
>>1. There is no row length standard.
>>Some people use 72 columns (these people are the least annoying). Some
>>people use 76, 78, 80, 62, and other wierd numbers. How many times
>>have you opened a text e-mail to find that you need to scroll
>>horizontally?
>
>
> A proper client can handle this for you. A line wrapping algorithm comes in
> at a fair few less than an HTML parser.
>
>
>>2. Quoting blows.
>>Let's say you receive an e-mail broken at the 72nd character, and
>>you reply with "> ". All those lines are now 74 characters long. It's
>>likely that when the person replies back, some of those quoted lines
>
>
> Again, a good client can do this for you.
A good client can do a lot of things, mine can render HTML email :)
>
>
>>Of course, you can re-justify the text, but that breaks any other
>>'formatting' the person has applied, like indentation,
>> * lists,
>>etc.
>
>
> Fair point.
>
>
>>3. Tables.
>>You can't do this in text, full stop.
>
>
> Yeah, but... I can't say as I've ever wanted to. You can't do pie charts in
> HTML but I don't see it being a problem.
Used this on several occasion, mozilla lets you copy a table from a web
page and paste into an email.
>
>
>>4. Collaborative e-mail editing.
>>Ditto.
>
>
> Not sure what you mean by that. Sounds more like a tool issue to me.
I'm not sure what Alex means by this but would be interested in finding
out..
>
>
>>5. Symbols, international letters, etc.
>>You think £ comes out the same in all text clients? Nope, reliant on
>>character set/font/etc. Esp. Windows->other. But £, ", etc.,
>>come out the same everywhere. This is especially important with
>>foreign characters - mail systems weren't designed to be 8-bit clean,
>>and HTML & MIME allow 7-bit transfer safely.
>
>
> That's a different issue altogether. UTF-8 deal with this fine. Admittedly
> UTF-8 capable clients are far and few between, but it beats the cobbled
> together crap that is HTML entities. Anyhoo, the amount of "HTML" that I read
> that has MS "Smart" Quotes etc. in it is unbelievable
>
>>I could go on :-P
>
>
> OK, HTML is hard to render on text consoles which a fair number of people use.
> HTML is not designed for email, how for example may one link to a previous
> email?
how would you do this is text email? I'm not sure I understand this?
There is no nestable <quote> tag.
HTML has the Q and BLOCKQUOTE both of which are nestable?
It's just not designed for email.
> The very nature of it makes it too complicated to compose email in so it has
> to be done opaquely through some form of WYSIWYG editor, which again is
> impossible on text interfaces and produces generally large and
> incomprehensible code.
true.
HTML needs a parser, and a complicated one at that.
to quote from above a good client will have this.
It
> is not rigourously specified (XHTML does this, but no-one uses it yet) so
> parsers have to be really hairy to actually work.
It is an ever increasing
> non-standardized standard with ever more vendor specific extensions that
> people are coralled into using, so no client can ever really claim to "read
> HTML email" apart from Outlook which dictates to everyone else. The source of
> the message is difficult to read. These are on top of the other obvious
> allegations that HTML is bloated and insecure.
All HTML is pretty rigourously specified at www.w3c.org
>
> Proposal:
>
> emails be written in PostScript.
> Handwritten PostScript mind.
Second proposol:
Clients support a simpler syntax e.g.
http://www.astaro.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=ubb_code_page
Dave.
> ___________________________________________________________________
>
> Sheffield Linux User's Group -
> http://www.sheflug.co.uk/mailfaq.html
>
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>
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