[pmmail-list] The rat's leaving the ship...

[Richard Grevers]

On Thu, 08 May 2003 21:39:25 +0700, Jeffrey Race <jrace@attglobal.net> 
wrote:

> On Thu, 08 May 2003 16:12:43 -0500 (CDT), Maynard Riley wrote:
>
>> Having a feature within the email client to send the raw body content
>> to the current browser is a brilliant and most effective solution. Let
>> the browser codebase keep up with advances in html rendering; don't
>> force that responsibilty into an email client.
>
> Amen.
>
> This has been thrashed out on several lists I frequent, and the
> conclusion is always the same: since there is no RFC for html-formatted
> e-mail, and since html is not a page description language, there is no
> way to build an e-mail client natively rendering html in a message
> window.   It is by definition an impossible task.   The only possible 
> workaround for those enamored of it is to pass the file (and the risk of 
> trojans, viruses etc) to the browser of choice.
>
Yes, using HTML to provide the sort of formatting that people (whether you 
think them misguided or not) ask for in email is the supreme irony, because 
it requires the very elements which have now been removed and/or deprecated 
from the markup language in favour of stylesheets. Even the mess generated 
by Microsoft Word is proprietary CSS properties rather than HTML.
In a long debate at the opera newsgroups, many people came out in favour of 
implementing and encouraging the standardization of the rich-text format 
developed by Eudora. It is also interesting to look at the example of 
Opera's M2 mail client, which converts all mail messages to XML and then 
renders them with the browser engine (of course ignoring scripts and 
external images).

-- 
Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/
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