On Tuesday, September 17, 2002, at 10:53 PM, Tony LaFemina wrote: > Lee, I think there's some confusion as to what's going on with HTML > and e-mail. Most of us traveling the internet automatically associate > HTML with web pages and web sites, which brings us to HTML coding. > Naturally, one would assume if you apply this coding to e-mail, the > e-mail would be sent in HTML format.
I don't feel confused. Let's take a look at the raw source of your most recent e-mail to the group as an example. Part of the header follows. > Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 22:53:39 -0400 > From: Tony LaFemina <remacs at optonline.net> > Subject: Re: MacGroup: Keychain password > To: macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu > Message-id: <3D87EAB3.20506 at optonline.net> > MIME-version: 1.0 > Content-type: multipart/alternative; > boundary="Boundary_(ID_nPGDOAUJvZtI5NPgMOvn1g)" > X-Accept-Language: en-us > User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC; en-US; rv:0.9.4) > Gecko/20011022 > Netscape6/6.2 > References: <92D27FFD-CA69-11D6-90ED-000A27B4B1D0 at Louisville.edu> > Sender: owner-macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu > Precedence: bulk > Reply-To: macgroup at erdos.math.louisville.edu We now know you're using Netscape 6.2 as your mailer and your mail has more than one part to it. It actually has two parts: a plain text version and an html version. In other words, you're actually sending two copies of every e-mail you send. Viewing the raw source of your mail -- something you don't normally see -- here's the header of the first part. > --Boundary_(ID_nPGDOAUJvZtI5NPgMOvn1g) > Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed > Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT This is the so-called "plain text alternative" that some mailers include. What follows this header is your message with any fancy formatting stripped out. Here are the first few lines. > Lee Larson wrote: > > > On Tuesday, September 17, 2002, at 01:36 PM, Tony LaFemina wrote: > > > >> Your reaction to this HTML thing in e-mail sounds synonymous with > the > >> movie Pleasantville, which is currently being shown on cable. I > >> personally think it should be left up to the sender of the e-mail on After this comes the html part. Here's its header. > --Boundary_(ID_nPGDOAUJvZtI5NPgMOvn1g) > Content-type: text/html; charset=us-ascii > Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT As you can see, the content is indeed html. You can affirm that by looking at the actual content of the part: > <html> > <head> > </head> > <body> > Lee Larson wrote:<br> > <blockquote type="cite" > cite="mid:92D27FFD-CA69-11D6-90ED-000A27B4B1D0 at Louisville.edu"> > On Tuesday, September 17, 2002, at 01:36 PM, Tony LaFemina wrote:<br> > <br> > <blockquote type="cite">Your reaction to this HTML thing in e-mail > sounds > synonymous with the movie Pleasantville, which is currently being > shown on > cable. I personally think it should be left up to the sender of the > e-mail > on how they want to format it. Both Netscape and Outlook Express are > free > downloads and recognize both plain text and HTML. If anyone has a mail > program > that can't read HTML, then let them download one of these if they > want.<br> > </blockquote> > <br> This html coding for e-mail was introduced by Netscape for use in Communicator. They chose html encoding because that was what their program could easily read. At the time, there was already an agreed upon "rich text" standard for e-mail that some programs were beginning to support. It is far more efficient and logical than html for e-mail. It is also now quite dead because it was displaced by an inferior system that was never designed for e-mail in the first place. -- Lee Larson, Mathematics Department, University of Louisville Phone: 502-852-6826 FAX: 502-852-7132 The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will be September 24 For more information, see <http://www.aye.net/~lcs>. A calendar of activities is at <http://www.calsnet.net/macusers>.
