Re: HTML document "attachment" icon

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Thu,  6 September 11:23 Toralf Lund wrote:
>  On 2001.09.06 10:46 M . Thielker wrote:
>  > Hi,
>  >  > On 2001.09.06 10:04 Toralf Lund wrote:
>  > > Also, perhaps you want to add the HTML icon when the message is
>  > > "multipart/alternative" and one of the parts is "text/html"? Or maybe
>  > not,
>  > > it might be that you want it only when no plain text version is
>  > available.
>  >  > I have pretty strong opinions on that one - I see the HTML icon as a
>  > warning. I don't want HTML mail and if someone starts writing email in
>  > HTML,
>  > I usually trash it unread and replay to them to re-send this and future
>  > emails using text-only format.
>  Well, it's definitely a matter of opinion. I think some people would want a
>  warning not every time a message contains HTML, but only when there is no
>  alternative to viewing it, i.e. when no plaintext representation of
>  the content exists.

In multipart/alternative the preferred rendering of a document is controlled
by the ordering of individual parts.  A UA should honour the preferences set
by the message sender by picking the highest quality version of the document it
is capable of presenting to the user.  There is no reason why a UA cannot
allow a user to specify the document formats they wish the UA to interpret.
There is also nothing to stop a UA from sending an MDN indicating that the
message could not be displayed or processed.  Finally, the UA should allow any
of the alternative versions of a document to be saved to a file.  For example,
a multipart/alternative document containing, say, application/postscript and
text/plain is useful even in a UA that cannot render postscript since the user
is made aware that the plain text document is an approximation of the
postscript.  Naturally, it should be possible to save the postscript and render
it elsewhere.

>  Apart from that, I don't quite agree that HTML is so bad. As I said
>  earlier, it seems to me that it's often an alternative to something far
>  worse, like MS Word documents. Also, I don't think HTML is really about
>  having 17 colours and 9 fonts (like someone else on the list expressed it).

I think the point was that given power to provide good presentation, people
abuse it and the result is worse than plain text.

>  As far as I understand, the intentions behind it is indeed to put focus  on 
>the content and provide a clear presentation. I guess what I'm saying
>  is that you shouldn't blame HTML for all the bad HTML documents people
>  write.

Exactly!

Personally, I feel the greatest abuse of HTML in mail is the excessive use
of graphics, which are big - particularly animations, and the use of scripting.
Used just for simple markup, results can be reasonably good.  Still, HTML is a
very poor match to email as opposed to the web.  Because of the browser wars
which caused all sorts of useless rubbish to be added to browsers, its also
very difficult to implement correctly and leads to excessive bloat.

Alternative mechanisms to provide for markup in mail have been proposed, see
RFC 1896 - "text/enriched MIME Content-type".  IIRC, Netscape/Mozilla support
this - maybe OE as well.  Maybe it would be useful for Balsa to support this
format.  Being able to send something more than plain text and something less
than HTML has its place.

Sadly, without widespread use of alternatives, we are stuck with HTML.

Brian