[pmmail-list] hyper-text?

[Simon Bowring]

Just a couple more points Tim!

>RFCs don't necessarily define behavior.
And that's the numero uno problemo with HTML email! 

Email should be accessable to anyone with an email clients! This 
requires a "common language" and HTML should not be that language, 
since it can legitimately include everything found in a modern 
bloatware-browser like IE (potentially including Java, JavaScript, 
frames, CSS, XML, forms etc etc), or can behave minimally like the 
lynx text mode browsers, or even more minimally like PMMail!
(i.e. a another good reason why HTML is not suitable!).

Anyone here experienced in professional level web-design (I don't 
mean people who earn their crust at it, I mean people that have
a deep understanding of the issues), will know how difficult it 
is to make web-pages and web-applications etc that either look
as the user intended or work "properly" accross even a half-dozen 
different browsers. Considering  HTML and browers were *designed* 
for each other this is a poor state of affairs, the situation
is worse for email clients because HTML and the other w3c standrads 
have no consideration for any of the special needs of an email 
client!


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

Agreed AS IS THE USE OF HTML FOR RICH TEXT EMAILs, introduced
as an undesirable and unratified extension by NetScape and then 
Microsoft during "the browser wars".  We're living with the
fallout now.

There should obviously be no issue with sending files in various 
formats as attachments (HTML, PDFs, Word, GIFs, PNGs, WMFs,  etc etc), 
but "forcing" email clients to have to understand any or all of 
these "foreign" file formats is not in the spirit of the email
standrads and is unltimately doomed to failure and tears, since 
the needs of different user communities are so different!

This is the cause of the continuous passionate arguments re 
plain-text vs HTML emails!

If you want to exchange WYSIWYG docs use (e.g.) PDFs
If you want to exchange text (information) use (plain)-text

Opening an attached PDF should open a PDF file viewer like Acrobat,
opening an image file should open an image viewer, and opening an HTML
file should open a web-browser!
 
If you want to exchange rich text (just consider text here)
but are happy that the rich text may be displayed as anything 
from:

1. All in a single monospaced monochrome font,
to
2. A range of fonts, sizes, proporionality, colours and attributes

then your askling for problems - how many times I have had emails
saying things like, my comments in red(sic)? (Quite a lot!)

Lastly there's the problem of user ignorance.  An email user (say
my aging mother) should be able to be confident that what she sends is
what is received. In the (ASCII) past, the only variation centred 
around line lengths and wrapping etc, which netiquette gave defacto
standards for and many email clients were implemented in ways that
supported this - all this is hundreds of times worse with HTML 
email! It's a mess!

Simon


ll
worlds
break  whose formating will not
be  cannot be guaranteed
then we need a simple limited
rich text markup for email, HTML should not be it, though a strict
subset might do

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