The analogy of Lynx as a plain text browser and a plain text mailer (like
pine or elm etc.) being able to decode HTML formatted emails is important.
Lynx is a powerful and evolutive tool which stays tuned with the latest HTML
technologies, trying to still display on a 80X24 black and white screen,
most of the information of a sophisticated HTML text.
I think that what we now need is a more sophisticated pine mailer which is
able to decode HTML mail into a plain text message (like Lynx is doing it).
What Pine is actually doing is a little bit different: it says, well I am
not able to decode it correctly, I will save it as is and the receiver will
decode it with a superior tool (a browser) in a second step. This two-steps
action is decouraging the use of simple HTML formatting in email to lists. A
transparent one-step would be better in my view.
Some mailers were able to send both ASCII and HTML in the same message
(Netscape and Outlook Express at least). Now we have to go a step further
and instead of sending both formats, plain text mailers should be able to
decode HTML messages directly, suppressing the markups and keeping the
visual structure that a 80 (or 132 columms or Xterm) screen allows.
I looked at the Mutt mailer which is yet another mailer (on Unix only and
not on X, look at www.mutt.org), very similar to pine (they recently added
IMAP); why all this lost of energy to have a similar product
instead of merging pine and lynx (both in source code) to have a modern
plain text mailer (modern meaning being able to decode HTML into plain
text).
Nicolas Brouard
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://sauvy.ined.fr/~brouard[/english]
