Re: [Sheflug] HTML mail (was Re: Linux)

[Will Newton <xxxxx [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 20 Sep 2002 10:47 am, Alex Hudson wrote:

> 1. There is no row length standard.
> Some people use 72 columns (these people are the least annoying). Some
> people use 76, 78, 80, 62, and other wierd numbers. How many times
> have you opened a text e-mail to find that you need to scroll
> horizontally?

A proper client can handle this for you. A line wrapping algorithm comes in 
at a fair few less than an HTML parser. 

> 2. Quoting blows.
> Let's say you receive an e-mail broken at the 72nd character, and
> you reply with "> ". All those lines are now 74 characters long. It's
> likely that when the person replies back, some of those quoted lines

Again, a good client can do this for you.

> Of course, you can re-justify the text, but that breaks any other
> 'formatting' the person has applied, like indentation,
>  * lists,
> etc.

Fair point.

> 3. Tables.
> You can't do this in text, full stop.

Yeah, but... I can't say as I've ever wanted to. You can't do pie charts in 
HTML but I don't see it being a problem.

> 4. Collaborative e-mail editing.
> Ditto.

Not sure what you mean by that. Sounds more like a tool issue to me.

> 5. Symbols, international letters, etc.
> You think £ comes out the same in all text clients? Nope, reliant on
> character set/font/etc. Esp. Windows->other. But £, ", etc.,
> come out the same everywhere. This is especially important with
> foreign characters - mail systems weren't designed to be 8-bit clean,
> and HTML & MIME allow 7-bit transfer safely.

That's a different issue altogether. UTF-8 deal with this fine. Admittedly 
UTF-8 capable clients are far and few between, but it beats the cobbled 
together crap that is HTML entities. Anyhoo, the amount of "HTML" that I read 
that has MS "Smart" Quotes etc. in it is unbelievable.

> I could go on :-P

OK, HTML is hard to render on text consoles which a fair number of people use.
HTML is not designed for email, how for example may one link to a previous 
email? There is no nestable <quote> tag. It's just not designed for email. 
The very nature of it makes it too complicated to compose email in so it has 
to be done opaquely through some form of WYSIWYG editor, which again is 
impossible on text interfaces and produces generally large and 
incomprehensible code. HTML needs a parser, and a complicated one at that. It 
is not rigourously specified (XHTML does this, but no-one uses it yet) so 
parsers have to be really hairy to actually work. It is an ever increasing 
non-standardized standard with ever more vendor specific extensions that 
people are coralled into using, so no client can ever really claim to "read 
HTML email" apart from Outlook which dictates to everyone else. The source of 
the message is difficult to read. These are on top of the other obvious 
allegations that HTML is bloated and insecure.

Proposal:

emails be written in PostScript.
Handwritten PostScript mind.
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