Chris Newman wrote:
If a simple profile of HTML were used in an interactive protocol where a
profile violation would be immediately rejected with an error, I'd have no
problem with it. The problem is that a profile of HTML is pointless
without strict enforcement of the profile because people will use any HTML
feature they can get away with.
Do you have examples of what you think would render such messages
unreadable to a viewer who only implemented "simple html"?
If a viewer supported something analagous to the minimal set of
text/enriched tags (say: P, BR, PRE, and character entities, ok, and
maybe UL and TT) then I believe that no matter how hairy the HTML got,
it would still be readable (unless they were doing something like
embedding text in GIFs, which makes it not really be an HTML problem at
all.)
I've seen an awful lot of HTML messages, and a lot of them contain
some fairly egregious crap -- but I can't recall seeing a single
message that would have been rendered *less* readable by the removal
of those non-basic tags. (The only thing that comes close would be
tables -- but people just don't use tables in day-to-day conversation,
I've never seen one that seemed to have been made on-the-fly.)
--
Jamie Zawinski http://www.jwz.org/ about:jwz