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

[Duncan]

Rui Maciel posted on Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:07:01 +0000 as excerpted:

> On 02/09/2012 12:34 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>>
>> 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.
> 
> Do you happen to know any Usenet standard that supports HTML?

Note that what he said doesn't /necessarily/ mean it must be displayed as 
fully-parsed HTML.  There's a couple other options as well.

One option would be to simply treat HTML parts as attachments.  They'd be 
saved when the attachments were saved and listed on the attachments 
line.  Additionally, when save text is chosen, the entire raw article 
would be saved, all parts included just as they appear in the raw 
message, just as they are now.

Another option that would fit in nicely with the first would be to add an 
open in browser option.  The existing browser setting that's activated 
when a URL is clicked would be opened to display the html part in the 
tool already designed to handle html in a secure and efficient way, the 
browser.

Yet another option, and the way claws-mail handles html, is to simply 
strip out the html tags, leaving only the plain text.  I know how well 
that works because I recently switched to claws-mail (from kmail, when it 
akonadified) as my mail client, in part BECAUSE it only displays plain 
text.  (It also has the open in browser functionality mentioned above, 
but I have that option turned off.)

And since akregator, my former feed reader, was going akonadified as 
well, I dumped it too.  At first I had planned to use gmane's new gwene 
service, where they gateway feeds to news just as they do lists with the 
gmane service.  However, as soon as I checked out a couple of the gwene.* 
hierarchy "groups", I realized *THAT* wasn't going to work, at least with 
pan, since feeds are natively XML, and they remain XML based in the 
gwene.* hierarchy.  Since I read news using pan and pan displays the raw 
HTML, that was DEFINITELY unworkable.

But the claws-mail feed-reader plugin was /perfect/, since claws-mail 
strips the HTML/XML tags for display anyway.  (I could have use claws-
mail on the gwene.* "groups" too, as it does do news, but I decided to 
stick with the feeds themselves and use the claws-mail feed-reader plugin, 
instead.  It works great! =:^)  So now I'm routinely using the claws-mail 
HTML/XML tag-stripping feature, every time I open my feeds instance.  (It 
took me a bit of extra effort, but while I was fine with claws-mail 
handling both mail and feeds, I didn't want them in the same instance, so 
I setup a second instance that handles the feeds, while the main instance 
handles mail, and normally run them both, started with the kde session 
and exited with kde as well.)  So I can DEFINITELY say that the claws-
mail tag-stripping feature works very well.  After seeing it in action, I 
certainly wouldn't mind seeing that same feature in pan, some day, as 
well. =:^)

But of course html/xml tag-stripping would be a non-trivial feature to 
add, tho it's possible the already well proven and tested claws-mail code 
that handles that could be reused for pan as well, thus taking advantage 
of their years of testing and implementation lessons learned.  But even 
then, porting it to pan won't be trivial, even tho they're both gtk and I 
believe both C++ based.  (Given that claws-mail is a fork of sylpheed, 
and Petr Kovar is active on sylpheed's docs at least, already, it's 
possible they use the same or very similar tag-stripping code as well, 
and his knowledge and experience would be of quite some help.)


So yeah, there's probably quite some agreement in eventually switching 
pan to not display raw html inline.  The differences of opinion would be 
over whether that means having pan do full HTML parsing and display, 
something I'm sure a lot of folks here including me would seriously 
disagree with, or having pan handle it some other way, either simply as 
any other non-plain-text-format attachment, or with a special open in 
browser function, or with a tag-stripping feature like claws-mail has, or 
even all three. =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman