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

[Duncan]

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.

If you want HTML parsing, you use an HTML client.  Such clients are 
normally called browsers.  Newsgroups are not the place for HTML, except 
as file attachments or code snippets (to be displayed in plain text) in 
groups discussing HTML, of course, and there have been many security vulns 
over the years due to inappropriate parsing of HTML /as/ HTML on the 
newsgroups and in email, that would not have occurred if the text had 
been treated as pure text data and the HTML not acted upon.

Additionally, it is often held (and I too argue, tho I generally reply to 
one post asking them to stop before I killfile in case it /is/ simply 
ignorance) that there are only three kinds of people that post in HTML, 
the spammers, who take advantage of HTML to hide bits designed to confuse 
the spam filters and to emphasize text they want emphasized, the spyware/
malware purveyors (including some spammers) that take advantage of web 
bugs/beacons to trace who reads their messages, if not something worse, 
and the ignorant "aoler" types who simply know no better or who do but 
simply don't respect their reader's rights to be free of the HTML abuse.  
It is argued that if the content is worth reading in the first place it 
doesn't /need/ html to dress it up or hide anything, so by definition, 
those posting in HTML are at minimum, ignorant posters whose posts can be 
safely ignored as not worth the trouble, if not worse, posters 
deliberately trying to spam or spread malware.

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.

-- 
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