Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: List Servers non-support of HTML

(continued)

Dec 14, 2002:  Check out new URL at end of this (and every list message) for 
Cohousing-L info page.  Season's Greetings.  Fred, list manager.
- -

Both HTML and RTF are transmitted as plain text, so except for the
transmission of graphic images, the connection you describe supports
them.  It's the Elm software that doesn't support them (because it
doesn't translate the HTML tags into formatting attributes).

Here's a complete (though very simple) HTML document, exactly as it
would be transmitted (in plain text):

  <html>
  <body bgcolor="#ffffff">
  <p>N Street Cohousing - History</p>
  <p>N Street Cohousing is unusual because it has arisen by gradual
evolution in the midst of existing suburban development
  </p>
  </body>
  <html>

But if the software on your end doesn't speak HTML, your document looks
like the above, instead of the intended:

  N Street Cohousing - History
  N Street Cohousing is unusual because it has arisen by gradual
evolution in the midst of existing suburban development

And of course, real-world HTML documents are a lot more cluttered than
this example, so they're not pretty, untranslated.

I guess the only good solution (short of lowest-common-denominator
non-support of HTML) would be a list server that would permit each end
user to select his mode (plain text or HTML), and which would also strip
tags from HTML-encoded messages before forwarding such messages to users
who had selected plain text.  Yahoo does not do this; I'm not sure why
not. It still seems to me that an HTML tag-stripper would be fairly easy
software to write. Maybe I'm overlooking something.

So until somebody produces the above, I guess plain text is the only
choice that includes everyone.

Greg Dunn

-----Original Message-----
From: cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org
[mailto:cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org] On Behalf Of Howard Landman
Sent: Sunday, December 22, 2002 10:12 AM
To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
Subject: Re: [C-L]_List Servers non-support of HTML

Dec 14, 2002:  Check out new URL at end of this (and every list message)
for Cohousing-L info page.  Season's Greetings.  Fred, list manager.
- -

> Just curious: what client do you use that doesn't support HTML?

I read this list using Elm, on a computer that has text-only access
(telnet or ssh).  So the connection method itself only supports plain
text - no HTML, no RTF, no MIME types, no attachments.  Elm is about as
good as I could hope for under that limitation, except that it doesn't
forward non-text elements properly, so that I can't solve the attachment
(etc.) problem by forwarding.  But the good thing is that I can read
this account from anywhere, using anything, no matter how primitive
(even a text terminal and a 300 baud modem).

Sigh.  There was a time, not too many years ago, when you could read
most email and browse most web pages using a text-only interface over an
acoustic modem and it was plenty fast.  Now we routinely have
multi-megabyte web pages, and I often get emails that cannot be read
unless I have the full suite of Microsoft Office installed (which I
don't).  How is somebody in the 3rd world supposed to be able to access
this stuff?

Of course, the bigger problem is that the email I receive here is:
        85% spam
        10% virus/worm attacks (which don't work since it's not Windows)
         3% this list
         2% actual personal email
But that's a different topic.

        Howard A. Landman (on the road today)
        River Rock Commons
        Fort Collins CO _______________________________________________
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RE: List Servers non-support of HTML	<– Date –> <– Thread –>
From: Greg Dunn (MyListsgregdunn.com)
Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2002 09:01:01 -0700 (MST)