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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.


> ___________________________________________________________________
> 
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> 
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> 

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