On Thu, 7 Mar 2002 00:20:26 -0500 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Barry A. Warsaw) wrote: >Here's the basic problem: there are lots of different use cases that >fall under the rubric "filtering HTML". Some people want it stripped, >some want it transformed, do we preserve links, etc, etc. It's hard >to support everything everyone wants to do with HTML messages, /and/ >do it in a way that's intuitive and easy to configure through the web. >I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's a lot of work, and MM2.1 has >to get to beta RSN. Plus, I think there are viable options (for the >short term) without having this functionality in Mailman proper. >E.g. demime.
Translation systems, whether speech recognition, natural language translation, or reformatting the content of email, are fundamentally imperfect. That's why worrying about making an HTML filter intuitive and easily configurable is important -- those attributes are exactly what make a translation system usable and useful. I think the various types of "filtering HTML" fit into a couple of broad categories. One is translation: converting HTML content into some other format in which most or all of the semantic content is maintained. The other is stripping: removing HTML sections entirely. The former is harder, more error-prone, and open to incompatible interpretations of what constitutes the "right" translation. Stripping, OTOH, is simpler, more predictable, and can usefully be applied to other MIME types that a list admin might deem verbotten, but not nearly as powerful. I'm suggesting that both types of filtering are useful in MM's processing, but can and probably should be presented as separate functions in the configuration UI since their roles and characteristics are rather different. -les _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
