Re: [Evolution] forwarding HTML mail as ASCII && URL

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> I have had to forward this mail to someone else and
> it got into the composer converted to ASCII text, which is fine. The
> HTML contained some URL, presented in blue in the message window, 
> not the URL, but the text attached to this URL between the <A ...>
> and </A> tags. The mail in the ASCII composer missed the URL and had only
> the text, which of course was not of any use for the next recipient.
>
> Is this somehow a bug, or a missing feature?

No, it is probably the correct behaviour.  The only logical thing to do
when converting HTML to text is to strip out the HTML formatting tags
and try to create the ASCII text to look as much like the original
*text* as possible - this does not, and probably should not, contain
extra bits of text that try to inform the reader of what's missing
compared to the original HTML.

I know, as a computer literate / HTML aware person you probably are, you
consider that information to be important and should be included in some
way - but others are not in that category and want the Plain Text
version to "look" like the HTML version.  Besides, where do you stop - a
URL may be important to you, but others may consider font or heading
changes to be important and want markers for those put in.  Should
images be rendered in ASCII characters, because they are more important
to some people.

If you want the URL information to be transmitted, then you are going to
have to switch to HTML for that email I'm afraid - or possibly hand edit
the ASCII version to include the URL.

P.