Re: [Evolution] HTML mail

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Sat, 2004-05-22 at 21:03 +0200, Eric Schaefer wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-05-22 at 20:05, Andre Klapper wrote:
> > if i remember correctly, this has not been implemented since the rfc
> > says that a message which has been sent both as html and plaintext
> > should be displayed in html (correct me if i'm wrong).
This is not quite correct.
> So why would you want to send the plaintext along with the html anyways?
Pretty simple, because not all clients can display html properly.  Read the relevent sections of rfc 2046 if you need more detailed justification.  Its to do with interoperability and open extensibility of the format.
> I dont think there is a RFC that deals with overriding user preferences
> for mail display (mail encoding is another chapter). If I want all my
> mail displayed as rot39 encoded plaintext, blue text on red background,
> the MUA ought to display it that way.
I would disagree.  Since that would be a pointless feature to add; it would even be useless to you since it isn't a standard representation of a typical human language.

Back to the topic, "multipart/alternative" is pretty simple, it provides the ability to send alternate and richer forms of email in ways that can still be ready by older or less featureful clients.  The standard says 'display the last part you know how to handle', and for senders 'send the data in order from most to least information lost'.

So we take the simplest approach - we follow the spec.  Evolution is a html emailer, it runs in a grpaphical environment, doing some artificial feature limitation as a user preferences doesn't have a lot of use.  And what are we supposed to do if we only get text/html with no plain alternative?  Just display it as an attachment?

Its not even that hard to do, probably a few lines of commented out code to make out evo is too dumb to know about text/html, i think, although it always tries to fallback for text/ types so it might need more code.

But, it just doesn't seem that useful.

If someone had really felt that strongly about it, they might've written a patch, but nobody has.

Michael Zucchi <notzed ximian com> Ximian Evolution and Free Software Developer

Novell, Inc.