Questions for PMMail Tech Support

[Simon Bowring]

On Wed, 13 Sep 2000 17:31:53 +0200, xavier caballe wrote:

>Is there any *formal* standard (such as a RFC) that says that? 
Yes - Many RFCs cover email, and yes, all email is sent as some 
varient of plain text, all email has to be capable of being converted to one 
of the 7-bit encodings that are guaranteed to be able to be transferred 
accross all types of links that are used for email.

Non text information (usually attachements) are covered by MIME and it 
allows various ways of encoding plain text and binary data etc.  

There's even an RFC that covers how to package the multiple files that 
make up a generalised HTML page into an email, however there are no 
standards that determine the behaviour of emailers with HTML attachments 
(really a "modern" HTML email message is (usually) an empty text portion 
with an HTML *attachment* -  much like sending a Word, or PDF, or executable 
as an attachment. Since the MS/NS feature wars, many windows mailers 
"support" HTML mail in some way or other, but no two mailers support it the 
same.  In reality expecting  an emailer to do this is even less valid
than expecting it to support PDF or Word format natively.  Email is for 
transferring information between email programs, Web Browers are for 
browsing/displaying HTML, Acrobat is for displaying PDFs and Word is for 
displaying (and editing) Word docs etc.

It is important for *all* email users that *all* email clients interwork.
HTML email is one of NS and MSs attempts to break this and generate
lock-in to their products.

HTML information transferred in an email, should be viewed in a 
browser (or HTML viewer), Word documents should be viewed in Word (or 
a Word viewer), PDFs in Actrobat... etc!

Personally I would not be adverse to a standard that allows some 
*very very limited* rich text markup for email - I think there *may* 
even be RFCs for this, but if there are, they have never taken off, 
so are no established standards rich text emails.  If you wish to 
send true WYSIWYG email, you have to attach a file in a format
format that supports it (about the only truly cross platform 
WYSIWYG format that exists today is PDF, which is owned by Adobe 
and is not an open standard).

HTML is particularly appalling at generating the same "look" in 
different viewers/browsers/emailers - ask any Web Designer - if you
wish to *approximate* to the same look for different browsers, you 
have to write JavaScript code in the HTML to identfy the browser 
being used, and generate different HTML markup for each specific
broswer (and even for different versions of the same browser).  
Nowadays, users want to use HTML to get near WYSIWYG results (like 
they expect from a Word Processor), they believe how they see their 
web page is how others see it, but this is only guaranteed true if 
they use the same version of the same broswer. 

HTML was never originally designed to "Look the same" in different 
browsers, it was designed as a simple markup language that supports 
Hyperlinking - the *information* was considered important, but not 
the "style".  

Now HTML 4 + MS's Cascading Style sheets (version 1 or 2) allows 
close to true WYSISWYG rendering to be achieved (at the cost of huge 
compexity in the browser), but *NO* (Zero) browsers currently available 
support this fully, let alone emailers!  The nearest *commercial* 
browser to meet these standards is apparanely MS IE 5.5 for Mac - MS 
IE 5.5 for Windows comes no where close!

HTML is a minefield, we don't need/want it in email. If users want "rich 
text" emails, HTML is the wrong answer - it's designed for hypertext!

Simon