On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 08:52:28AM -0500, Bernie Cosell wrote:
> On 7 Mar 2001, at 13:35, John Neale wrote:
>
> > >Rumor has it that AOL has posted instructions on the web on how
> > >to make AOL 6.0 send plain text messages. In my mind this is
> > >a good thing because it now permits AOL customers to once again
> > >send commands to the ListProc command processor that Cornell University
> > >uses.
> >
> > I'm left scratching my head wondering why system administrators feel unable
> > or unwilling to put a filter on the front end which will convert HTML
> > encoded text to plain text. It's not hard.
>
> 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].
It's definitely possible. If you have not seen w3m, you should: it is
a very good text-mode browser for Unix systems. (Whether it can be
built on Windows, I don't know.)
See <URL:http://ei5nazha.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/~aito/w3m/eng/>.
I'm extremely impressed with the rendering engine. It takes pages that
would be almost unrecognizable under Lynx and makes them quite legible,
if not an absolute joy.
Part of the problem is that shrink-wrapped packages to do the HTML
rendering are few and far between. It would be more than an
afternoon's work to rip out the w3m engine and build it as a
standalone filter. Listar's MIME/HTML code is available as a
standalone library, and there is demime.pl for those who aren't
using enough RAM already.
> 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...
My experience suggests that they're more likely to complain
to the list manager that the mailing list software screwed up all
their pretty widgets.
--
Regards,
Tim Pierce
RootsWeb.com lead system admonsterator
and Chief Hacking Officer
