[pmmail-list] Yea! An HTML email troll!

[Simon Bowring]

Excellent! It's about time we had another a blood-boiling and 
fruitless HTML mail argument. Sure beats the hell out of the "BPSW 
are [not] supporting PMMail" arguments! 

On Tue, 29 Apr 2003 11:15:28 +0700, Jeffrey Race wrote:

>There is no way to know how it was intended because html is not
>a page description language.  
True, although  with a full and strict iplementation of CSS1 (or better
CSS2) it *could* be, however there's no requirment for it to be, and 
there's no way of knowing or interogating the remote recipients' 
capabilities! It's a huge mess!

Simply stripping all the HTML tags (as PMMail/2 does) is just 
as legitimate an interpretation of the HTML as (the several man-years 
effort required to) implement all of HTML4 and CSS2 formatting! I 
doubt [m]any mailers implement this except (recent versions of) 
Outlook which simply uses IE to do it's HTML dirty-work (whoosh, 
here comes another worm)!

>See <http://www.camblab.com/nugget/htmlmail.pdf>
Not bad!  Although you don't mention that no standards exist to 
govern the *behaviour* of html-aware mailers (only the MIME
packaging of them) e.g.

1. Whether the client/renderer should "follow" embedded 
   URLs (e.g. to fetch embedded images, style-sheets, and
   other objects, which allow spammers to trace you, and 
   malware onto your system) or not. Even forgetting the 
   security implications for a moment, such objects might 
   be on a remote intranet, behind a firewall or otherwise 
   inaccessible to the mail client)!

2. Whether (or according to what rules) the sender should MIME 
   encode/package objects referred to via embedded URLs or not 
   (and how deeply etc).

3. Which elements if HTML are supported, and how they are supported 
   in the context of email (e.g. forms)

You'll find different versions of Outlook behave differently
wrt to these points - brilliant - I suppose MS think we need email 
so that we can fail to communicate properly with other 
users!?

IMO any "techies" who thought of html email in the first place but 
who didn't dismiss the idea out of hand as being unworkably stupid 
and impossibly technically unsound (within minutes) should be lined 
up against a wall and shot.  IMO these people have given up their 
right to design software! If they'd been working for MS-Japan, I've 
no doubt they'd have done the honourable thing by now ;-) Had it 
have been me, I would have had to leave the profession - I wouldn't 
have been able to cope with either the shame or the derision and 
hatred of my peers!

I can even remember having several pub conversations with 
fellow programmers that started off with one saying something 
like "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to support HTML in email..." 
only to have numerous technical hurdles thrown up within 
*seconds*!

The technical *incompetance* of the guys at NS and MS who 
started (or allowed) this rubbish is *absolutely staggering*
to me!

Imagine if you worked for a car manufacturer and they said
that in the interests of "improving" their product (e.g. reduce the
weight), they were going to make a car out of paper! 

Hopefully engineers within the organisation would ask what would 
happen to it when it rained, caught fire or crashed etc etc. 
Hopefully they would then either cancel the project as unworkably 
stupid, or find solutions to the problems. 

This didn't happen with HTML email - it DOES exist, is HIGHLY
problematic and NO SOLUTIONS to many of the technical problems 
exist!

IMO this could only have happened in the USA, where they have an 
appallingly cavalier attitude to engineering and technology¹. 
The Germans, for example, with their fine tradition of excellent 
engineering practice would (correctly) never have allowed it!

Maybe programmers should be licensed! There'd be a lot less of 
them and a lot less software, but I'd bet that it'd be a lot
more useful than the triumph of form-over-function throw-away-ware
that serves as software today!

[So, I think I'm with you on this one Jefferey ;-)!]

Simon
--
¹Soon they'll have assililated the difference between cm and inches!
- 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
---------------------------------------------------------------------