[pmmail-list] hyper-text?

[Tim Roberts]

On Wed, 24 Jul 2002 15:24:14 +0100 (BST), Simon Bowring wrote:
>
>...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.

I'd like to take a blasphemous position here, if I may.

While what you say was true a few years ago when HTML e-mail was just being 
explored, it is no longer true.  The uncomfortable fact is that Microsoft 
Outlook now defines how HTML e-mail is to be rendered.

On the other hand, there is no particular reason why HTML e-mail has to be so 
weird.  What Outlook does is just not that hard to do.  There are any number 
of HTML-rendering controls available today; you just pass a string containing 
HTML tags, and it renders as expected.  I've been surprised it has taken 
PMMail so long to do this.

>...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, ...

There is something to what you say; HTML in its purest sense was originally 
designed to describe the content of text, not its presentation.  However, 
HTML *as it has evolved* is perfectly adequate for formatting.  Its very 
ubiquity makes it silly to ignore it.

>...so there's a helluva lot of "baggage" in most HTML capable email 
>cleints other than mere text markup, ...

None of which PMMail is obligated to reproduce.

>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).

While this is a very satisfying position to take, because it lets us look 
down our noses at all those poor Outlook users, this is just not true.  There 
is no dramatic innovation required to construct a mail reader that displays 
99.9% of today's HTML e-mail in a manner indistinguishable from Outlook.


--
- Tim Roberts, timr@probo.com
  Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

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