Re: Allow people to circumvent W3 for HTML

[Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>]

On Sat, 20 Oct 2001, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net> writes:

[...]

>> Yes, please. Actually, allowing me to easily control what is used to
>> render HTML to text would be ideal; I want to pipe it through (for
>> example) html2text(1) rather than use W3.
> 
> Doesn't
> 
> text/html: html2text %s; copiousoutput
> 
> or something in ~/.mailcap work?

Er, didn't last time I tried... ...time passes...

...or maybe not. I thought I did have it in there. Let me try again.

No. Adding it and restarting XEmacs (and, thus, Gnus) completely failed
to cause to it take effect: the HTML mail still caused W3 to load.

Lesse... Within `mailcap-mime-data', we have my values *first* in the
list, with the W3 values last.

W3 is definitely chosen; there isn't an issue with searching this data
in reverse order, is there? More testing...

Found it. The breakage comes for `mm-display-inline'

Basically, `mm-display-part' comes in, makes sure the mailcap files are
parsed, locates the viewer from the mailcap data (getting html2text),
then asks:

  (if (and (mm-inlinable-p handle)
           (mm-inlined-p handle))

When this passes, it calls `mm-display-inline' which unconditionally
uses W3. The HTML part isn't considered to be capable of being inlined
unless W3 is present.


Now, having looked at this, I can most certainly go and fix this problem
by redefining the stuff in the inlined type data structures to call my
shell command and parse the content that way.

However, in answer to your original question: No, adding that to
.mailcap or *any* other mailcap file will never work when the W3 library
is installed.

So, bug or feature? You decide ... but I would suggest adding a fairly
easy to reach default that let the end user call a shell command to
reformat the text and make it inline rather than forcing W3.


I will post my solution once it's written; it should be capable of doing
that if someone with commit access wants to add it. It waits on my
finishing cleaning my bedroom so I have somewhere to sleep tonight,
though. :)


> Hopefully Netscape won't cater to that line.

It seems to be brighter than that, at least for versions of Netscape
equal to Mozilla 0.9.5+. :)

      Daniel

-- 
Time spent in the advertising business seems to create a
permanent deformity like the Chinese habit of foot-bonding.
        -- Dean Acheson