Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
ned+ietf-822(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com writes:
OK, [...]
Thanks. I wanted to say all that, but was too tired to write clearly.
There is one more thing. The hucksters who are gluing advertising onto
other people's outgoing mail may reasonably be assumed to do it in HTML
too (if not now then soon), by inserting a new <div>...</div> in
existing messages and adding some CSS. It is unreasonable to assume that
they'll prefer to use separate and labelled bodyparts.
Arnt
What I find fascinating is that this gentleman's belief or sense it a
industry right to advertise on the back of others and mailers should
pass thru unprohibited foregoing any receiver and/or user safety measures.
Right. With todays email clients, its not really a requirement to have
MIME based text/html context tags. The body is detected and rendered
accordingly. Yahoo and others wrap their outgoing user mail with <div>
advertisment windows. I recall back in the late eighties how this
created a STRIPPING WAR among mailers. One added, One Stripped! The
irony is is that the stripper only worked when you paid the vendor :-)
Fortunately, the email clients are getting better with such things, such
as blocking image webbots by default. TBIRD controls this very nicely,
as well as controlling phishing HTML links that have display domain and
link references mismatches, example:
<a href="http://1.2.3.4";>http://some_highvalue_domain.com</a>
But the clear dangers today is WEB 2.0 or basically Javascript. With the
advent of AJAX and JSONP, this is fast becoming the rule, rather than
the exception. We preach unobstrusive designs (fall back to web 1.0)
but far too many are forcing web 2.0 only designs. DNSREPORTS.COM is a
prime example of this unfortunate evolution. It won't no longer work
unless you have JavaScript enabled and its NOT using JAVASCRIPT for the
great DNS reports it offers. No fallback. It using JSONP/AJAX to
seemlessly track activity.
We just went completed a new project and release implementing Web 2.0
features to our web mail system but not before we found many dangers
with how many of the message content now viewed today. The problem?
The ajax libraries out there do no filter by default.
Anyway, -1 on this suggestion. :-)
--
HLS