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  From: David Newall <davidn@rebel.net.au>
  To  : Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
  Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2001 19:12:21 +0930 (CST)

Re: Content Filtering ( was Re: How to get best results from LinuxSA)

On Sat, 7 Jul 2001, Greg Lehey wrote:
> point to an explanation about why HTML mail is bad (in my book:
> there's no portable way to reply to it and quote the original text).

To be fair, HTML mail isn't intrinsically bad, and if it suffers from
problems that normal text mail doesn't also suffer from, it is problems
related to "a rich user experience."  People seem to think it's okay
to send large graphic backdrops with their small text, which can really
blow out the size of a message, and you can't do that with plain text;
but the problem of quoting isn't unique to HTML, or even worse than with
plain text.

There are plenty of ways to quote text in HTML, just as there are
plenty of ways to do it with plain text.  Plain text does at least
have the advantage that an ASCII 0xDE is an ASCII 0xDE, even if the
glyph is different from place to place, and if that's what you mean
by plain text then I suppose it's at least portable.  But if you mean
plain text is whatever the local system uses, then Unicode and EBCDIC
both argue that plain text quoting can be as non-portable as HTML.
(HTML's problem isn't glyphs or character coding, because that's covered.
HTML's problem is that there are different standards, so what works in
one HTML browser/editor won't necessarily work in another.)

I'd say that it's unsolveably difficult to automate recognition of quoted
text in HTML, but I think the same is true with plain text.  Really they
are about as good, or bad, as each other (in this regard.)

Microsoft quote original text using a margin bar.  I don't know how
they've done it, but I certainly can think of at least one good way that
it could be done, and portably to the extent that tables are portable.
(Note that very old versions of HTML don't support tables, however these
are so old that you could reasonable ignore them.)

I'm becoming grumpy, and my hair is turning grey, which is perhaps why I
like plain text and don't like HTML (for email.)  I acknowledge that this
is not a satisfactory reason to resist the change.  If I think about it I
can come up with reasons that are arguable, and that might be convincing,
but perhaps there are equally arguable and convincing reasons to "move
with the times."

If I had a good HTML enabled email reader on my desktop I'd probably be
quite unconcerned when people send HTML mail.  As it is I tend to just
quietly discard such messages.  After all, maybe they aren't evil.

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