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Re: [Nmh-workers] Superfluous  's

2014-10-28 10:54:50
On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:11 AM, Robert Elz wrote:

If the browser vendors cannot be convinced of the utility of providing a
command line switch to set the default char set (which can be passed through
to the actual browser that displays the page however they like) then the
only alternative to me would seem to be to wrap the html from the message in
enough extra glue to expressly define the char set to use.

Yep, and that is something that nmh should not do.  As long as nmh can
provide the charset value to an external program, then nmh has done all
it can do.

If the external viewer does not support a charset/encoding option, then
a wrapper script can be written to modify the data before the external
viewer is launched.  In the case of HTML, a <meta> tag can be added to
the data to designate charset.  For example:

  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

Of course, a smart script would not insert the tag if the data already
has it.

Ken, is there a % sequence that gets expanded to the charset of the
entity so it can be passed to an external program?


Of course, a rational alternative is to simply ignore the html, and read
the text version - it was every bit as good, and (in the case in question)
was all simple untarnished ascii...

And, it is more secure.  HTML in email is EVIL.

IMO, I would not blindly launch any HTML entity into a browser with a
javascript engine.  Browsers like lynx, w3m, links do not carry the
javascript baggage, hence are safer when viewing HTML data.

GUI-based browsers open you up to trojans.

Launching HTML from email into a GUI browser should only be done if you
reviewed the data first to see there is nothing malicious or you run a
sanitize filter against it.

--ewh

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