[pmmail-list] hyper-text?

[Brian Morrison]

On Fri, 26 Jul 2002 13:42:17 -0700
"Tim Roberts" <timr@probo.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 26 Jul 2002 19:05:08 +0100, Brian Morrison wrote:
> >
> >Please tell us the RFC number of the email standard that defines the
> >behaviour of html encoded mail.
> 
> RFCs don't necessarily define behavior.
> 
> RFC 1521 covers MIME, and defines how the MIME headers and sections
> are to be formatted and interpreted.
> 
> RFC 1866 defines HTML, and covers how a MIME section of type text/html
> is to be interpreted.
> 
> RFC 2111 defines the method of embedding images into a message that
> can be referred to by URL in another section.
> 
> RFC 1738 defines URLs, and reserves the cid: URL for referring to MIME
> body parts.
> 
> So, the RFCs tell us how to find an HTML section in a MIME message,
> how to interpret HTML tags, and how to embed images in other sections
> to avoid having to make another network request round trip.

Good, that's about what I was expecting you to say, although I couldn't
remember the RFC numbers.

How well does OE follow these RFC definitions then? If PMMail can be
made to work with well defined html then I won't complain, but it seems
to be that OE output is a moving target. I just want to be able to have
the behaviour I get in PMMail/2, where html tags are stripped
completely. Somehow I doubt this will be possible in PMMail 2000.

> 
> None of these say "this sequence of tags should be rendered in exactly
> this way", but it isn't supposed to.  That level of detail isn't even
> given for HTML via WWW.  The renderer (browser or mail reader) is
> supposed to decide how to render the tags.  PMMail for Windows chooses
> one method of rendering HTML.  Its method is valid, but it happens to
> produce rather poor results.

And there is the problem, can't rely on things looking how the sender
saw them.

> 
> The PMMail propensity for scanning for <.H.T.M.L.> tags within a
> text/plain section is an undesireable extension.

One wonders why the tags are there at all....

-- 
Brian Morrison

bdm at fenrir dot org dot uk
- pmmail-list - The PMMail Discussion List ---------------------------
To POST to the list, send your message to:
pmmail-list@blueprintsoftwareworks.com

To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message to mdaemon@bmtmicro.com 
with the first line of the message body being...
UNSUBSCRIBE pmmail-list@blueprintsoftwareworks.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------