Re: format=flowed : why not use HTML?

At 11:32 AM -0700 8/20/98, Jamie Zawinski wrote:
>But the reality is that nobody has even *tried*.

Nonsense.  We have tried with text/enriched.  We do a reasonable job if people use some restraint.  Could we have tried a lot harder?  Yes.  Would we have improved the output?  Somewhat (the nesting rule is a problem, and text with lots of style changes simply must be ugly).

But for HTML, you're right, we didn't try very hard, because it's useless.  It's not a matter of optimization or any nonsense like that.  I used to think like Chris does, that maybe it could be done if you're careful.  But it can't.

It's simple, everyday constructs that HTML has to go through gyrations to display.  Anytime there is more than one space (or, god forbid, a tab) you get some &nbsp's.  Every hard return is more markup (and you're really best not even to think about how to get two lines without whitespace between them).  And of course you can't use <.

Hopeless, if you want to have any fidelity at all to the original text.