Life after PMMail

Mon, 27 Mar 2000 16:42:27 +0000 (GMT)

On Mon, 27 Mar 2000 16:29:25 +0200, xavier caballe wrote:

>There's a IETF working group on that (http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/mhtml-charter.html) 
>and three RFC (2110, 2111 and 2112). (I must admint I'm not aware if any email client conforms 
>to this standard).

Hrmpf! These unfinished "proposed standards" (from an apparently "dead" or 
horribly bogged down working group?) are not agreed standards, and AFAIK 
nothing has come out of the group for 2 or 3 years! (i.e. "dead" in internet 
timescales). In my view, nothing further is likely to come from them.

If an IETF working group can think about how HTMLised emails can work for 
over 4 years without coming up with a finished proposal, I think its safe 
to say the approach is, uhm, problematic!

The RFCs mainly concern themselves with how HTML docs (web pages) should
be bundled together to solve the "one-document-made-of-multiple-files"
problem of HTML; they do not begin to consider the problems introduced
by choosing HTML as a rich text markup language.

Following they're own *advice* (not in the "proposed standards"), if 
you want to interwork with other html mailers, you have to avoid 8 bit 
(i.e  European and international) characters, and style sheets (i.e. the 
bit of HTML 4 that actually defines what the text should look like), and 
only use certain tags:

  <b>, <i>, <underline>, <nofill>, <param>, <html>,
  <pre>, <smaller>, <bigger>, <center>,
  <flushleft>, <flushright>, <fontfamily>, <color>,
  <paraindent>, <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6>,
  <em>, <strong>, <cite>, <address>, <title>,
  <head>, <body>, <blockquote>, <code>, <kbd>,
  <var>, <samp>, <tt>, <br>, <hr>, <a>, a <href>,
  <p>, <ul>, <ol>, <li>, <menu>, <dl>, <dt>, <dd>,
  <base href> 

If the standard said the above was the (entire) set of tags 
supported, then that would go a long way toward fixing
many of the problems, since most of the difficult stuff from
HTML has been left out, unfortunately the standard DOES NOT
say that!

Sadly, you can't tell you email program what tags to use or not
to use, and a lot of the WGs advice contradicts advice for good 
HTML, (like you *should* use style-sheets)!

Oh shit, another flame war!

Simon