Re: viewing embedded HTML and MIME with external viewers

Re: viewing embedded HTML and MIME with external viewers

[Michael R. Wolf]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Michael R. Wolf <MichaelRunningWolf@att.net> writes:
>
>> Here's the *scrubbed* HTML that generated it. How *hard* would it be
>> to buttonize the links rather than scrub them out (or pass it directly
>> to a full-featured HTML browser)? I know exactly how *helpful* it
>> would be.
>
> If you use w3 as the HTML renderer, all the links will be clickable
> and stuff.

I've never used w3.  In fact, I went looking for it the night I found
that Oort had been released, so I figured that I wouldn't need it.
But while I was digging around, I thought I saw a mention that w3 was
old and crufty, lacking in features, and hadn't been updated since
1999.

If I'm mistaken due to incomplete research, I'd appreciate a link to
an approved, modern, useful w3. Having clickable links would make me
feel like I'd just taken a step forward into the 90's. :-)

Thanks!

-- 
Michael R. Wolf
    All mammals learn by playing!
        MichaelRunningWolf@att.net

Re: viewing embedded HTML and MIME with external viewers

[Burton Samograd]

mah@everybody.org (Mark A. Hershberger) writes:
> Emacs/W3 works from CVS, but tends to be slow.  Also, although there
> are areas that could be improved, development has slowed.
> 
> An alternative if w3m.el.  I have w3.el and w3m.el installed and use
> both.

I could never get w3 to work on my system so I tried out w3m, and
since doing that I've never touched another browser since (unless I
need graphics, for which there is mozilla).  It even supports tabbed
browsing in a single w3m session.  It's great.

-- 
burton samograd
kruhft@kruhft.dyndns.org
http://kruhftwerk.dyndns.org

Re: viewing embedded HTML and MIME with external viewers

[Jeffery B. Rancier]

Michael R. Wolf <MichaelRunningWolf@att.net> writes:

> If I'm mistaken due to incomplete research, I'd appreciate a link to
> an approved, modern, useful w3. Having clickable links would make me
> feel like I'd just taken a step forward into the 90's. :-)

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/elisp/w3/docs.html
-- 
Thanks,
Jeff
,----
| Jeffery B. Rancier
| 
| Softechnics
| a METTLER TOLEDO company
`----

Re: viewing embedded HTML and MIME with external viewers

[Michael R. Wolf]

frederic.line@wanadoo.fr (Frédéric Liné) writes:

[...]

> Here are the results of the contest :
>
> * the winner is  w3m  : the page-setting is not perfect but better than 
> links'one. Many [img].
>
> * 2nd lynx  : many [img] everywhere in the text. Otherwise good. No 
> page-setting.
>
> * 3d links : no accent, and the page-setting is awful.
>
> * 4th w3 : as you said the lightest mistake in the HTML results in a 
> text renderind.
>
> w3m, lynx and w3 failed on the same messages but the failures are not 
> as so common as with w3. However they are not rare.

Indeed, they are *not* rare!!! Not by a long shot.

I'll even go so far as to say that they are common, and increasing.
Increasing in number. Increasing in importance. It used to be that I
could ignore all the HTML messages I received because they were SPAM,
but at an increasing rate, I'm getting critical information in HTML --
my accountant, my father, my brother, my friends, consulting clients,
business colleagues, invoices, and all other manner of business (i.e.
practical dollar and cents) issues.

I could choose to stay non-HTML, non-graphic, and expect (or even
require) that my sources (the environment) change, but I know what
happens to folks that don't change with the environment. Some folks
call them dinasaurs. We all know that they're extinct, or on that
path. I'd prefer to change *me*, and my reaction to the environment,
because I can't change the *environment*.

Call me practical, but until emacs can be a fully graphical browser,
all the internal renderers are bound to be playing a follow-the-leader
game of "catch up" to "real" browsers. It's just another game of
reinvent-the-wheel, but forgetting that that "ultimate wheel" is the
result of many iterations, and that all the mistakes made (and
corrected) by external (that's right *external*) *real* browsers will
have to be made (and possibly corrected, but in my observation of the
state of the practice, ignored to linger and fester), thus reverting
the game to
pretend-to-reinvent-the-wheel-(to-make-it-better)-but-settle-for-a-flat-tire-(which-is-worse).

BEGIN(important_core_of_message)

    So, given that the strategy of emulating a *real* browser will
    never work -- by design of the base strategy -- how do you launch
    a message body that contains raunchy HTML (graphics, audio, video
    and all) into a browser so that it can (so to speak) eat its own
    dog food (a trick it does very well)?

END(important_core_of_message)

Thanks,
Michael

P.S. I hope you can read my real frustration at needing a practical
solution, not just sarcastic ranting, in my description. I'd love to
stay inside emacs, having trained my fingers to it over about 20 years
now, but I do realize that emacs as a graphical editor, however
desirable, isn't likely to occur to solve the current, daily, problem
of understanding and replying to messages from the graphical,
ill-formed-HTML world.

-- 
Michael R. Wolf
    All mammals learn by playing!
        MichaelRunningWolf@att.net

Re: viewing embedded HTML and MIME with external viewers

[Ichimusai]

frederic.line@wanadoo.fr (Frédéric Liné) writes:

> w3m, lynx and w3 failed on the same messages but the failures are not 
> as so common as with w3. However they are not rare.

Your results are the same as mine. At work there are many people using
Outlook under MS Windows for sending mail. The output from that
program can make any HTML coder cry, it is just horrible what comes
out. Unfortunately they are very common mailers and I still wanted to
use Gnus.

I ended up writing my own washing function, that removed all the HTML
tags and reformatted the buffer, but I wasn't relly happy with it.
Sometimes it screwed up with paragraph formatting and things like that
so I tested W3. W3 worked very well until I installed and upgraded to
new versions of Emacs and gnus. Suddenly W3 became extremely picky
with what it accepted and choked on mail that it has previously
rendered pretty okay.

So I tried Lynx. It did not work much better.

I got the advice to try Links and it works well. It swallows any HTML
mail I throw at it and I am quite happy with it, though some things
don't look as nice in links as they do in w3, I am not bothered,
emails usually don't have too many advanced features in them.

-- 
AA #769 ICQ: 1645566 Yahoo: Ichimusai AOL: Ichimusai1972 MSN: Ichimusai 
IRC: Ichimusai#AmigaSWE@IRCnet URL: http://www.ichimusai.org/  
"| <-- You must be smarter than this stick to ride the Internet."
    -- Screwtape, alt.fan.douglas-adams

Re: viewing embedded HTML and MIME with external viewers

[Kai Großjohann]

Michael R. Wolf <MichaelRunningWolf@att.net> writes:

>     So, given that the strategy of emulating a *real* browser will
>     never work -- by design of the base strategy -- how do you launch
>     a message body that contains raunchy HTML (graphics, audio, video
>     and all) into a browser so that it can (so to speak) eat its own
>     dog food (a trick it does very well)?

Hit K b to get a button for the text/html, then hit e on that button.

If your message is not a multiplart message -- hm.  I'm not sure what
to do in that case.  Anyone?
-- 
This line is not blank.

Re: viewing embedded HTML and MIME with external viewers

[Pranav K. Tiwari]

On Wed, 07 May 2003 19:36:11 -0700, Michael R. Wolf <MichaelRunningWolf@att.net> writes:

> Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:
>
>> Michael R. Wolf <MichaelRunningWolf@att.net> writes:
>>
>>> Can I directly launch the HTML body, or any of the attachments into an
>>> external viewer (i.e. Internet Explorer, RealPlayer, GIMP, OpenOffice,
>>> etc.)?
>>
>> Do `K e' from the summary buffer.  If the message has several parts,
>> you can use a prefix to select which part to operate on , e.g.
>>
>>       3 K e  = view the third part externally
>>
>> You can also `e' or `v' from the article buffer with point placed on
>> the MIME button.
>
> 'K e' from Subject buffer and 'e' from Article buffer both prompt in
> the minibuffer with "Save MIME part to: c:/some/default/here". Seems
> that there's some bad magic happening. In the past, if I was desperate
> enough, I'd specify a path, then go double click it from the "File
> Explorer". Not convenient, but it worked.
>
> 'v' from Article buffer prompts in the minibuffer with "Viewer?".  I
> don't know how to specify "OpenOffice" or "Quick Time" or "Internet
> Explorer".  Do you?
>
> Does this mean that I'm missing the .mailcap magic?  If so, is there a
> way to use the default WinDOS settings rather than reverse engineer
> them into a text form?
>

You are right - seems like your .mailcap is missing.  Assuming that your
internet explorer can deal with all these files correctly, you can add each
filetype into your ~/.mailcap as below. I have the following in there, and
these filetypes are shown in the "right" application. The .doc files go to
Word, .ppt goes to powerpoint etc. There might be a better way of doing
this, and if there is, hopefully someone else will chime in ..

Note that the path specified in .mailcap is DOS path, and not a Windows
path.

-p

text/common;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
application/msword;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
application/msexcel;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
image/jpeg;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
image/pjpeg;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
image/gif;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
image/bmp;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
application/pdf;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
application/ppt;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
application/vnd.ms-powerpoint;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
application/vnd.ms-excel;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
application/vnd.framemaker;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
application/x-frame;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
application/x-zip-compressed;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
application/octet-stream;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s
video/mpg;C:\PROGRA~1\INTERN~1\IEXPLORE.EXE %s