Re: [Pan-users] Reading an HTML posting when using 'old' Pan

[Steven D'Aprano]

Duncan wrote:
> Maurice Batey posted on Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:34:12 +0000 as excerpted:
>
> > On Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:20:29 +0000, Maurice Batey wrote:
> >
> > > Is there a 'read HTML' facilty in old Pan?
> > Google Groups shows there was a bug (78723) that was fixed in
> > Pan 0.12.0 so that HTML would be shown correctly.
> >
> > I'm using Pan 0.14.2.91.  Perhaps the HTML text in the posting was
> > invalid...
>
> Pan neither new nor old parses HTML.  It simply displays it as "raw" 
> plain text, html tags and all.  That was a part of GNKSA, which Charles 
> and various pan users including me felt rather strongly about.
[...]
> The bug you refer to was probably that pan didn't display text/html 
> mimetype blocks even as plain text, in the buggy versions.  It probably 
> treated those mime parts as attachments, instead.

That is not  bug, it is a feature. That is the correct behaviour for any 
application which (rightly, in my opinion) chooses not to render HTML.

I really don't understand the choice of displaying HTML attachments in-line as 
raw text. It seems to be saying "Screw you, I dislike HTML posts and so will 
deliberately make them as obnoxious and annoying as possible in the hope that 
Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, IBM, etc. will change their mind about supporting 
HTML mail in their mail clients". As if that's ever going to happen.

Face it: the war is lost. HTML is an astonishingly ugly and inefficient 
technology, but it is so embedded in our technologies that even if it were 
discovered that reading HTML emails caused cancer, it wouldn't go away. Pan's 
behaviour here is tilting at windmills. The sensible approach is risk 
mitigation without the loss of functionality: treat HTML attachments as 
attachments.

There's no good excuse for running multiple text-like attachments together in 
the body pane as if they were all part of one document, particularly when 
those attachments are only nominally text like HTML.



--
Steven