Hmm... I guess you could do that but I imagine the resulting text could be awfully confusing. HTML includes the & stuff, which would need translating as well. Since we talk about HTML/DTML/ZPT all the time, this translation is pretty critical. There are also layout issues that concern me, since HTML email is machine generated and probably has no underlying ASCII layout. And then there's the issue of links, which are essentially out-of-band data and can't be representing cleanly in ASCII. What I'm saying is that just stripping tags is not quite sufficient to translate HTML to text and still have something readable. I'm also worried that such automatic translation would confuse newbies further by posting mangled messages. I think the right thing to do is bounce HTML-only messages with a clear response saying the list does not accept HTML email and provide links (ASCII, of course) to a couple of helpful pages on how to turn off HTML email for popular mail clients. Dual bodied messages could be posted if we just drop the HTML body completely. But overall, I just don't care that much. I'm just happy we keep the spam down to a minimum on the group.
-----Original Message----- From: Paul Tiemann [mailto:pault@center7.com] Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 9:49 AM To: Charlie Reiman Cc: zope@zope.org Subject: RE: [Zope] Re: OT: HTML
Sorry for the confusion. What I meant to say was "filter out the HTML tags, not the entire HTML messages..."
More importantly, zope@zope.org is an educational forum. It's open and free to encourage newbies post and get their questions answered. Newbies are the most likely people to post in HTML so tossing their postings will only confuse and fluster them further.