Re: [Pan-users] HTML Rendering

[Duncan]

Steven D'Aprano posted on Fri, 05 Dec 2014 10:21:57 +1100 as excerpted:

> On Thu, Dec 04, 2014 at 08:54:58PM +0000, Andreas Paeffgen wrote:
>> I use 0.139 on Fedora20 and see a lot of html tags in some posts of
>> gmane.org newsgroups.
>> 
>> Has Pan the facility to render html or to supress it? For humans, html
>> to read is very distracting.
> 
> It does now, apparently, but not in Pan 0.139
> 
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=633877

In current pan (built from git, you can see the git commit in my headers 
since I'm replying with pan), in pan preferences, on the applications 
tab, there's a spot to fill in HTML previewer, just as there's a spot for 
external editor and for mail client.

There has been a rather strong negative sentiment to adding direct HTML 
parsing support to pan, in part due to the potential security issues -- 
no pan user seems interested in pan supporting web bugs, for instance. 
Pan's users, at least the ones on this list, seem pretty traditional in 
that respect, and as one of the very long time (since the gnome-1 version 
before gtk2) users both on this list and of pan, I definitely agree.

That said, an implementation that would /filter/ html, rendering it as 
simple plain text, isn't as objectionable, and in fact that's exactly 
what claws-mail (the gtk2 based mail client I use here) does.

In the gmane groups/lists I subscribe to (including this one), people are 
generally discouraged from posting HTML, tho it occasionally happens, in 
some lists/groups more than others.

However, even where HTML tends to be more tolerated, the general practice 
is for such mails to include both HTML and plain-text parts.  Whenever I 
respond to such I generally strongly recommend that people only do plain 
text, for all the usual reasons, but I make a general policy of not 
responding /just/ to say that -- I must have something on-topic to say as 
well.  

As for HTML-only posts, they tend to be considered rude in a lot of 
contexts, and while I'll sometimes reply to them as well if they're not 
/so/ bad it's major work to read the text, I will sometimes killfile 
users who repeatedly post in HTML, especially if it's HTML-only, because 
anyone posting in HTML clearly has no respect for general readability and 
politeness, NOR for the security of their would-be audience.

Meanwhile, while it's unsuitable for binary groups as it's single-
threaded, claws-mail (with its HTML-filtering as mentioned above) can 
handle both news and, with a plugin, rss/atom feeds.  At one point I 
considered using it to read the gwene.* groups/feeds on gwene/gmane, but 
pretty quickly realized that I could just as easily subscribe directly to 
the feeds and use claws' feed-reader plugin on them, eliminating gwene 
from the loop without ill effect since it's the same client I'd be using 
either way.

Anyway, if the built-in HTML processor is still in current pan (the 
option I mentioned above may have replaced it, I'm not actually sure and 
have never used it anyway so don't even know how it works) I don't have 
it enabled at build-time here, so I don't know if it simply stripped tags 
like claws-mail does, or if it actually attempted to parse them and 
display HTML.

What I do know is that the moment I do a git-pull for pan that either non-
optionally enables such parsing/display or non-optionally build-time 
requires some HTML-parsing library to support the run-time-optional 
parsing, is the same moment I go looking for a different news client, 
which would be a shame given that during the dark years when pan was 
basically abandoned, I was pretty much the only regular here keeping the 
lights on, or at least the only one actually posting replies when people 
asked questions.  Because were that to happen, pan would no longer be 
pan, for me.

But due to that and the others here with similarly strong thoughts, I 
doubt it'll happen.  In practice, I think any developer that strongly 
liking HTML so as to go against the user base here isn't likely to stick 
with pan long enough to have an interest in actually developing it.

And just to be clear, I'm not opposed to a tag-stripping pan much like 
claws-mail does with its messages, as long as that's /all/ it did, tho I 
think I would occasionally miss actually having the raw HTML displayed, 
occasionally, too.

Another alternative that should be quite simple to implement, would be to 
simply not display any text/html parts, only text/plain, treating text/
html as another attachment which could of course be saved and opened in a 
different application if desired.  Of course then people who posted in 
HTML-only would appear to have blank posts except perhaps for any 
attached images, but IMO, so-be-it.  If they can't respect the security 
and display prefs of their readers, I don't want to see what they have to 
say anyway.

-- 
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