[pmmail-list] hyper-text?

[Simon Bowring]

On Sat, 20 Jul 2002 12:29:37 -0700, Curtis Delzer wrote:

>What can PM-Mail do about messages that are HTML format, just ignore them? 
>Now  it just will not display them, except in raw form.

The windows vesrion does it's best to display HTML messages IF it 
thinks the message is correctly formatted as HTML (the OS/2
version simply strips the HTML tags, and show the plain text as
an email clinet should - much nicer), however the whole history 
of HTML and email is a HUGE mess and there's various different 
and illdefined (i.e. made up by email client authors) ways that 
different email cleints from different periods of recent history 
format the message. Also, insufficient standards exist to allow HTML
handling to be standardised across different clients.  Not only 
do these standards not exist, they are never likely to because HTML is
technically most unsuitable to be used as a "Rich text" markup - it
was designed for hyperlinking and web-apps and a whole lot of
stuff over and above formatting, so there's a helluva lot of
"baggage" in most HTML capable email cleints other than mere text 
markup, and this baggage is the primary cause of all those nasty 
stupid Outlook email worms that spread so fast and cause so much 
bother. 

A small cost for an system that lets people do bold and red 
text, and select fonts that don't actually exist on the computer
your sending to etc etc - I think NOT!

The best thing to do is not use HTML email as God intended, but
that's becoming less realistic with all the wysiwyg weanies out 
there, clamouring for complex, technically unsound and virtually 
unworkable solutions to the simple problem of text mark-up!

The bottom line is that there are insufficient and inadequate 
standards defined to allow HTML emails to properly interwork 
between different email clients (and the situation is likely to
stay that way for some considerable time).

So ther are ONLY 3 solutions:
1) All email clients in the world are updated to agree to
   standards that don't actually exist (ROFL), or
2) People stop using HTML email (tick!)
3) Everyone in the world uses the exact same email client, thus
   enusring the "rules" are the same, if not standardised 
   anywhere! i.e Go back to Outlook and get your virus
   software up-to-date ;-)

And that's the bottom line!

Whatever BSW do, some users will experiences "problems" with HTML,
emails and will stay shouting for an intractible problem to be 
solved!
 
Simon

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