On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 12:29:12PM -0500, P N Stenquist scripsit: > I'm not sure I understand the logic of this. Why go to all this > trouble to avoid html? With today's speed and memory, it doesn't > present any problem. Or am I missing something? Is it a PC thing or > Linux thing?
It's an any computer thing. To view HTML, something has to take the (plain text, remember) HTML file, parse it, and render it. This is a (generally very considerable) security hole, and always will be, world without end, amen, because HTML is a bletcherous and implausible collection of historical bug-for-bug compatibility rendered by rendering engines designed to show you *something* at any cost and entirely promiscuous in their use and acceptance of plugins. (This is, tangentially, why you dare not trust "it renders in the browser" as a testing tool; it's amazing what a modern browser can figure out how to render.) Reading your email in plain text could (it doesn't, or at least didn't use to, in the case of Thunderbird) take that rendering step out of the process and closes the security hole. I use a program called mutt to read email; it's a command-line only console email application for unixes. HTML mail gets rendered into plain text through a text-only browser that has no awareness of what javascript *is*, never mind support for it, and no plugin infrastructure. Links are displayed in a format I can open in the regular browser if I want to; images get dropped on the floor. -- Graydon (who is typing this using Vim; lots of people would consider that Going Too Far) -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
