[Zope] Re: OT: HTML

[Charlie Reiman]

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.
>
>
>