On 8/20/98 at 10:49 AM -0700, Chris Newman wrote:
It turns out that *every* client which generates text/enriched or
text/html results in largely unreadable output, and that includes the
vendors who gave us assurances about how it would be readable.
OK, let me at least put in a tacit objection to this. Though HTML cannot be
made readable to save its life, simply because each multiple space must be
encoded as , each quote and angle bracket must be similarly encoded,
and each line break *requires* a directive, the same is simply not true of
text/enriched. In fact, we follow everyone of the following directives in
text/enriched:
It may be possible to make this stuff readable, but it requires very
careful engineering -- doing things like merging adjacent style runs,
keeping careful track of the plain-text output column, pushing paragraph
markers to the right edge, making sure spurious plain-text newlines aren't
inserted, not generating boilerplate at the beginning and so forth. The
fact nobody has done this is adequate evidence that it's too hard to be
practical.
What makes text/enriched unreadable is that once users find it, they
inevitably decide that they need to use every feature of it: As soon as you
include a font or a color change, you generate a horrible looking directive
for every occurance. Also, the quoting convention is a pain to display in
plain text. Other than that, it is perfectly easy to generate simple
text/enriched, and at least we are able to do it very straightforwardly.
HTML is a lost cause. There is no way to have anything that's vaugley
readable as plain text and legal HTML.
But even with text/enriched, I still don't think it solves the basic
problem: People want wrapped text with a quoting convention that can be
dealt with by fancy mailers as will as /bin/mail without metamail
installed. This solution is an elegant way to get there. No formal markup
is at all reasonable to solve the problem.
pr
--
Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com>
QUALCOMM Incorporated
Work: (217)337-6377 or (619)651-4478
Fax: (217)337-1980 or (619)651-1102