On 7 Mar 2001, at 9:19, Cyndi Norman wrote:
> 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 ...
Er, this inquiry was in the context of something to do filtering... I
guess, as sysadmin, you could trap those pages, store them in local .html
files, lynx them, then cut-and-paste them back into the message and then
forward that back to your list. Other than Lynx, is there another
browser that'll render "plain text"? I use IE5 and it sure doesn't -- a
cut-and-paste from a rendered web page gets you a mess...
And just to clarify: I was making a *technical* comment, not an
_administrative_ one. HTML *is*hard*. Try looking at the code in one of
the text-rendering engines and see just how awful it is [and indeed, what
it doesn't do. For example, if your'e a fan of 'demime', demime doesn't
actually deal with the HTML: demime uses the HTML::Format Perl module to
do most of the heavy-lifting, and that module includes the caveat:
> > None of the current formatters handle tables or forms yet.
[NB "formatters" here refers to the Perl modules that HTML::format uses.
YMMV for other HTML->Text compilation engines, but the more I learn about
HTML the more awestruck I am that real browsers manage it at all....]
But I would agree: it is probably the case that as
*system*administrators* [rather than hackers/programmers] it is probably
not all that hard these days to get reasonable conversion from
HTML=>formattedtext... just invovles buying/installing the right app.
The *app* will be a complicated mess, but that's not your problem...
/Bernie\
--
Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Pearisburg, VA
--> Too many people, too few sheep <--
