From: "Bernie Cosell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 08:52:28 -0500
Just to make clear, it *IS* hard. It is not hard to unwrap the MIME
sections and hack away the HTML tags and let the devil take the hindmost,
but it is close-to-awful to actually try to do something reasonable with
the HTML and have it come out looking like an ASCII representation of
what the poster intended [cf <TABLE>, <FRAMESET>, and friends].
Why is it hard? If I ever need nicely crafted plain text from HTML (and
for some reason cut and paste from my browser isn't working), I just run
Lynx from the UNIX shell (note that the Lynx people have versions of their
wonderful text-only browser for Macs and PCs. If you're a web designer you
should always run your pages on Lynx to test them. It will tell you what
people choosing plain text will see and what blind people encounter).
I think Lynx handles tables now and it does frames by giving you a menu of
the various sub-frame options. Not that I've ever seen anyone send frames
in an email. I didn't even know it was possible (it certainly isn't
desirable).
I've peeked at a lot of the HTML in HTML messages I've recieved. 50% of
them (guessing at the breakdown here) use no markup whatsoever (or markup
with a default font). It's HTML for no good reason. Maybe another 30% use
the HTML to place italics, bold, or some simple font changes into their
text. The rest are trying to send graphics or other programs (in many
cases they're only forwarding another email or other plain text document,
but the mailer codes it as an attachment).
But maybe that's OK: if folk see that their carefully crafted 142K of
HTML comes out looking like an incoherent mess of plain-text, perhaps
they'll do something different next time...
If only it were true. A good number of the mailers that send "plain text"
along with the HTML version really send mangled text. Usually they add an
"=" at the end of every line and put in some slash-numbers instead of
special characters. I've seen long threads on some lists about why that is
the case but I've never seen anyone change their mailer's options.
Sometimes the "plain text" is so incredibly mangled that it's barely
legible but the users (if they even see the mess) rarely make the
connection of "oh, *I* did that" even if they know it intellectually.
Cyndi
--
_______________________________________________________________________________
"There's nothing wrong with me. Maybe there's Cyndi Norman
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