From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/25836 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Russ Allbery Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.gnus.general Subject: Re: HTML recognition Date: 11 Oct 1999 15:36:16 -0700 Sender: owner-ding@hpc.uh.edu Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: coloc-standby.netfonds.no X-Trace: main.gmane.org 1035163152 16163 80.91.224.250 (21 Oct 2002 01:19:12 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@main.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 01:19:12 +0000 (UTC) Return-Path: Original-Received: from spinoza.math.uh.edu (spinoza.math.uh.edu [129.7.128.18]) by sclp3.sclp.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA19447 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 18:39:34 -0400 (EDT) Original-Received: from sina.hpc.uh.edu (lists@Sina.HPC.UH.EDU [129.7.3.5]) by spinoza.math.uh.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id RAB08261; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 17:38:32 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: by sina.hpc.uh.edu (TLB v0.09a (1.20 tibbs 1996/10/09 22:03:07)); Mon, 11 Oct 1999 17:38:36 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: from sclp3.sclp.com (root@sclp3.sclp.com [204.252.123.139]) by sina.hpc.uh.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id RAA29497 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 17:38:25 -0500 (CDT) Original-Received: from windlord.stanford.edu (windlord.Stanford.EDU [171.64.12.23]) by sclp3.sclp.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id SAA19421 for ; Mon, 11 Oct 1999 18:36:23 -0400 (EDT) Original-Received: (qmail 6650 invoked by uid 50); 11 Oct 1999 22:36:16 -0000 Original-To: ding@gnus.org In-Reply-To: Dave Thomas's message of "11 Oct 1999 13:18:16 -0500" Original-Lines: 80 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.4.66/Emacs 19.34 Precedence: list X-Majordomo: 1.94.jlt7 Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.emacs.gnus.general:25836 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general:25836 Dave Thomas writes: > Russ Allbery writes: >> The problem with both is that they have an entry cost; if you don't >> want to write the markup or don't think your text will benefit from >> markup, but you're writing in HTML, you *still* have to make some >> effort to ensure that the HTML processing doesn't mangle it (escape >> <>&, tag paragraphs, handle literal text and short lines, do something >> with quoting, etc.). > No, your MUA does all that for you. You just type. As someone who's written a text to HTML converter, I wish it were that easy, but it's not. What do you do with something like: - First point. - Second point. when you find it in the middle of the message? How about: while (1) { fork(); } and how do you recognize something like that to mark it up correctly? What do you do with nested quoting, which is a real bear in HTML? If your MUA does all that for you, you end up with HTML of the sort that's generated by Netscape or Microsoft's automated markup generators, which frequently do horrid things to stuff like that and in general guess wrong a lot. That defeats the whole purpose of using markup, at least in my opinion. I've managed to write a text to HTML converter that gets things *I've* written right about 99% of the time. It botches horribly things written by other people with slightly different writing styles. I'm really skeptical of the idea that it's possible to do significantly better. I suppose you can dump the user into a WYSIWYG interface to compose their e-mail, but I'd really rather not go there. > Plain text word wrapping sucks, html does it, but at the expense of > having to distinguish text *not* to be wrapped. Etc etc.. Actually, I'd say that plain text word wrapping works quite well. We're all using emacs, I presume. emacs does a very good job at this. I don't even have to think about it. Even if someone else uses substandard broken software, emacs can generally do a decent job of fixing it. And I've seen HTML word wrapping break badly. It's an interesting exercise to read a lot of the web with a decent font size (say 18pt or so) and watch the text go off the side of the screen because people are abusing tables and other similar constructs. > I'm just saying that it's unfortunate that those in the van seem so > wedded to TTY and Telex technologies, and often have a knee-jerk > reaction against alternatives which, if widely employed, might actually > make things better. If you're a writer, or have read books on writing, you've probably heard the tales of how, when submitting manuscripts for publication, you never use proportional fonts and normal spacing. You submit double-spaced manuscripts in fixed-width fonts. Why? Because the editors read manuscripts all day long, they've always read manuscripts like that, and they like it that way. To me, news and e-mail are tools. The important part is the content; the formatting is just a mechanism to get it to where I can read it. I've been reading it the same way for a very long time now and I'm used to plain text with 70-76 column margins in a fixed-width font. I've tweaked my fonts from years of experience so that they're maximally readable with a minimum of eye strain because I'm reading text on a computer screen for twelve, fourteen, or more hours a day. The flipside of "try it, it might improve things" is "why fix it when it's not broken." -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)