(Off topic warning! It's about an HTML posting solution...) It seems HTML posting is a frequent problem on the list, enough to generate occasional threads like this one... Why not filter it out at the source? From the mailman faq: Q. My users hate HTML in their email and for security reasons, I want to strip out all MIME attachments. How can I do this? A. Mailman 2.1 will probably have this feature built-in, but for now you can use add-on tools such as demime or stripmime. More information on these tools can be found at: (Stripmime) http://www.phred.org/~alex/stripmime.html (Demime) http://scifi.squawk.com/demime.html <snip> Etienne is supplying both a plain text and HTML version of the message. Please configure your email reader to display the plain text part in preference. Etienne and others should not post HTML, neither alone nor together with another format. At least I refuse to read messages containing HTML: they are often four to ten times larger than necessary. And, unfortunately, my email reader insists to use the highest quality variant present in the message. Thus, they are killed unread. </snip>
For me, HTML email is occasionally pretty handy. Yes, I dislike it but sometimes I need to annotate text with colors or underlines or links. ASCII just doesn't do that. 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. That's enough of a devil's advocate position. I don't really have any objection to stripping HTML. Removing all attachments might be a problem as patches are occasionally posted as attachments.
-----Original Message----- From: zope-admin@zope.org [mailto:zope-admin@zope.org]On Behalf Of Paul Tiemann Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 8:43 AM To: zope@zope.org Subject: [Zope] Re: OT: HTML
(Off topic warning! It's about an HTML posting solution...)
It seems HTML posting is a frequent problem on the list, enough to generate occasional threads like this one... Why not filter it out at the source? From the mailman faq:
Q. My users hate HTML in their email and for security reasons, I want to strip out all MIME attachments. How can I do this?
A. Mailman 2.1 will probably have this feature built-in, but for now you can use add-on tools such as demime or stripmime. More information on these tools can be found at:
(Stripmime) http://www.phred.org/~alex/stripmime.html
(Demime) http://scifi.squawk.com/demime.html
<snip> Etienne is supplying both a plain text and HTML version of the message. Please configure your email reader to display the plain text part in preference.
Etienne and others should not post HTML, neither alone nor together with another format.
At least I refuse to read messages containing HTML: they are often four to ten times larger than necessary. And, unfortunately, my email reader insists to use the highest quality variant present in the message. Thus, they are killed unread. </snip>
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.
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.
On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 10:01:21AM -0700, Charlie Reiman wrote:
What I'm saying is that just stripping tags is not quite sufficient to translate HTML to text and still have something readable.
lynx --dump is pretty good. --PW Paul Winkler "Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is made - today!"
On Thursday 05 Sep 2002 5:31 pm, Charlie Reiman wrote:
Removing all attachments might be a problem as patches are occasionally posted as attachments.
If a patch is big enough to need to be an attachment, it is big enough to not belong on the list (IMO)
+1 IMHO no patch belongs onto the list. patches for zope belong into the issue collector. that's what it's there for. jens On Thursday, Sep 5, 2002, at 12:49 US/Eastern, Toby Dickenson wrote:
On Thursday 05 Sep 2002 5:31 pm, Charlie Reiman wrote:
Removing all attachments might be a problem as patches are occasionally posted as attachments.
If a patch is big enough to need to be an attachment, it is big enough to not belong on the list
(IMO)
I would also like to suggest that we bounce all messages containing the word tree ;^) -Casey On Thursday 05 September 2002 01:00 pm, Jens Vagelpohl wrote:
+1
IMHO no patch belongs onto the list. patches for zope belong into the issue collector. that's what it's there for.
jens
On Thursday, Sep 5, 2002, at 12:49 US/Eastern, Toby Dickenson wrote:
On Thursday 05 Sep 2002 5:31 pm, Charlie Reiman wrote:
Removing all attachments might be a problem as patches are occasionally posted as attachments.
If a patch is big enough to need to be an attachment, it is big enough to not belong on the list
(IMO)
Perfect. I'm almost finished with my dtml-lovelier-than-a-poem Product.
-----Original Message----- From: zope-admin@zope.org [mailto:zope-admin@zope.org]On Behalf Of Casey Duncan Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 11:09 AM To: Jens Vagelpohl; zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] Re: OT: HTML
I would also like to suggest that we bounce all messages containing the word tree ;^)
-Casey
On Thu, Sep 05, 2002 at 11:15:31AM -0700, Charlie Reiman wrote:
Perfect. I'm almost finished with my dtml-lovelier-than-a-poem Product.
I bet you could write some *really* nice poetry using Scripts (Perl)... :0 -- Paul Winkler "Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is made - today!"
Yet Another Solution to the "HTML Posting Issue" might be that we all just stop being agressive about HTML-postings. As some people said, moslty newcomers to zope post HTML, and since zope@zope.org is for users, both old and new, it could do very well to stop being annoyingly harsh about HTML postings. As far as I know, tolerance never goes out of fashion in civilised company. I dislike HTML postings as much as anybody else and here is a nice procmail rule for those who really dislike HTML postings: # HTML based mail :0: *Content-Type: multipart/alternative; PeskyHTMLMail it will place those mails in a mailbox called "PeskyHTMLMail" (replace that with /dev/null to taste). Feel free to add other rukles with different content types. I do think that polite reminders about HTML postings are in order, since there will always be people who are not completely aware of current list rules. Defending HTML posts, however will give you bad Karma for three complete lifecyles. So there. /dario - -------------------------------------------------------------------- Dario Lopez-Kästen, dario@ita.chalmers.se IT Systems & Services System Developer/System Administrator Chalmers University of Tech.
=?iso-8859-1?Q?Dario_Lopez-K=E4sten?= writes:
Yet Another Solution to the "HTML Posting Issue" might be that we all just stop being agressive about HTML-postings.
As some people said, moslty newcomers to zope post HTML, and since zope@zope.org is for users, both old and new, it could do very well to stop being annoyingly harsh about HTML postings. As far as I know, tolerance never goes out of fashion in civilised company. Each message from the mailing list says at its end: no HTML, no cross posting. Every person should understand that. I would expect that at most one HTML message arrives from any newbie.
As we all know, this is not reality. Some persons send HTML mails for months and years. We are not aggressive about HTML mails. We just tell the senders to stop sending them.... That means, if we read them at all... Dieter
Paul Tiemann writes:
... A. Mailman 2.1 will probably have this feature built-in, but for now you can use add-on tools such as demime or stripmime. More information on these tools can be found at:
(Stripmime) http://www.phred.org/~alex/stripmime.html
(Demime) http://scifi.squawk.com/demime.html Please do not "demime" unconditionally!
Sometimes, MIME is completely adequate, e.g. when you attach a patch. Dieter
Please do not "demime" unconditionally!
Sometimes, MIME is completely adequate, e.g. when you attach a patch.
I don't suggest that attachments be filtered out, only the HTML tags that so many complain about... ;) I only mention a possible solution because I feel sorry for all those poor zope newbies whose first experience with the list is to be blasted for posting HTML. (also the fact that the "HTML issue" seems to generate threads like this one occasionally, which I find even more humorous now that I'm contributing to them... doh!) ;) Paul
participants (8)
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Casey Duncan -
Charlie Reiman -
Dario Lopez-Kästen -
Dieter Maurer -
Jens Vagelpohl -
Paul Tiemann -
Paul Winkler -
Toby Dickenson