On 3 Nov, Andrew Reilly wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 03, 2000 at 02:28:06AM +1100, Rick Welykochy wrote:
> > HTML is a text markup facility.
> > MIME is a general-purpose encoding scheme for *any* content type.
> >
> > Tell me, Luke, how would MIME help you enriched email
> > using MIME? The only way I can think of is encoding an enriched
> > document, which brings us to the same probs we have with HTML
> > email: bulk, useless in text-only, etc.etc
>
> Don't go too hard on Luke. MIME did in fact define it's own
> "rich text format". Based somewhat on tools of the Andrew text
> editor system at CMU, I believe.
Thanks, Andrew. You expressed my point much better than I did.
I should also add that HTML is about the worst choice you can make for
text presentation, because Netscape and M$ during their browser wars
period hacked in lots of extensions, and implemented things
differently. So that nowadays, about 80% of the effort of implementing
something that displays HTML "correctly", is in fact making it
bug-for-bug compatible with IE and Navigator.
At least, that was the clear impression I've received watching from the
sidelines on one of the projects at work.
> > > Though I only know of one mail program that displays MIME 100% correctly
> > > according to the specs, and *that* one is a friend's private hobby
> > > project still in development. :-(
And to carry on with the correction, I should re-phrase that as:
"...one mail program that displays MIME's enriched text format 100% correctly..."
(It's a hobby project, BTW, under Windows, and I badger him about
porting it to Unix, from time to time.)
> I suspect that the Andrew mail system did it right too, but
> since that never got out of CMU, I haven't had a chance to look
> at it.
Mmm, likely.
> To Luke's friend: How useful is it to have the only mailer in
> existence that supports _any_ standard?
Knowing Alex, he probably feels that just because M$ and Netscape get
it wrong, doesn't mean he should implement a half-compliant solution
too.
luke
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