>Why do yall go through so much trouble to not utilize existing Internet
>messaging standards? The overhead of an HTML message is pretty small. I
>wouldn't be surprised if it was near the overhead of a UUENCODE!
I guess you get the live feed of list-managers. 'Cause your message
looked like absolute crap when it was bound into the digest version.
This is not your fault. But it is damn near impossible to mix raw
messages from 50 different people using 50 different mailers and hope
that you can get anything legible. That is why I have scripts that try
and strip everything down to the bare essentials - the text.
I run a digest-only moderated list. Despite the fact that most of my
readers live in the States, most of them do not seem to be very
sophisticated, net-wise. Thus, I have to cater to the lowest common
denominator, mail-reader wise.. I like the idea of HTML mail so much,
though, that I have yet another script that takes the plaintext Digest
version and does a damn good job (if I do say so myself) of making a
very useful HTML document out of it that I ship to about 10% of my
readership (the amount of people who actually use an HTML capable
mailer). I've put hacks in to add hyperlinks from the table of contents
at the top to the actual message, and links to return you to the table
of contents. I automatically make links out of anything that looks like
a URL or an e-mail address. Any URL that ends in .GIF or .JPG or .JPEG
is automagically turned into an in-line reference so that the image will
actually be loaded into the middle of the digest itself. I also do
minor things like italicize included text or text bordered like _this_.
I also do the bolding for text like *this*. Finally, I change the color
of the text of the moderators comments. All automagically with some
brutal Perl scripts.
Oh, I almost forgot the coolest feature. I've set up anchor links
around each poster's name that does a search in the archives for every
post ever written by them. So you can find what they've written before
at a touch of a button. I also make the subject lines magically
clickable in the same way so that you can find all previous posts with
the same text as the subject.
With this system, I've accomplished two things. One, everyone can read
and post to my Digest, without excluding anyone due to the mailer they
may be using. Two, my HTML readers get a very sophisticated digest that
marks up *all* posts, even those written in PINE on a terminal server,
with useful hyperlinks.
-todd-
