Re: [CSCMail-Users] Linebreaks

[Steven K. <st...@re...>]

Daniel Schregenberger wrote:
> 
> Actually this fixed the "problem". The messages look like before and like I'm
> used to.
> 
> In fact I never noticed the layout wasn't correct (the thing with the TABs)
> 
> You're right: converting a \t to 8 spaces is just a hack but I don't care much
> about that (I don't think it's important to format emails (at least for me)).
> So for me this is alright. But for the long term your right.
> I noticed the widget used to edit messages also replaces \t by a number of
> spaces. Maybe the source of this one could help for a temporary fix. (just a
> suggestion)

The editing widget is a text widget...  The core of the problem is that
there is no &tab; character in HTML...  HTML was never designed to be a
text layout language.  In other words, it is designed to define "types"
of content, and the display agent is supposed to provide proper
formatting.  For example, the <P> </P> tag pair... A "good" HTML display
agent should indent the first line of the paragraph.  None do... HMTL
specifically ignores whitespace.  This includes \n, \t and even <space>
characters.  For example, like a good typist, I insert TWO spaces after
a sentance.  You can't see that though, because HTML ignores the
whitespace, dropping the 2nd space.  Of course, we have a <P> tag, but
no <SENTANCE> tag.  HTML designers dropped the ball there.  Is it a text
layout language?   NO! they say, user agents control text layout, HTML
simply defines the text types.  That is why they are removing things
like align=center from tags.  Problem is, in the real world, people want
to use HTML as a text formatting language.  They want to specify that
this paragraph should be centered, and not leave that up to the user
agent.  It's a mess, but anyway, I rant too much.

Ideally, I should use a text widget to display text/plain messages, and
an HTML widget to display text/html messages.  However, I think users
like the "pseudo" HTML formatting that using an HTML widget for
everything provides (things like auto-hyperlinks)

> btw: I noticed that HTML-Mails not declared as such (which means normal
> text-mail with html-content, just like I would write this mail with html) have
> not been displayed correctly with the PRE-Tags. This is actually not cscmail's
> fault, but the programs who created such mails, but its a hint that this was a
> hack.
> If you like to I can forward you one such message.

Yeah, this is one area where I have been "strict" .. If a message is
"text/plain" then I treat it as such... This is a "good thing" in my
mind... That way, I can send you text email that contains code snippets
or HTMl examples (eg: "the use of <P align="center"> is depreciated)
without it getting munged into some sort of HTML mess...

(If your MTA is displaying all this text centered, it's time to switch
to CSCMail <grin>)

If an MTA is sending out "true" HTML mail that has it's MIME type set to
text/plain, it's broken, and there's nothing I can do about it... If you
want to email someone a "hyperlink" just send them the URL... all modern
MTA's (including CSCMail) will automagically turn URLs in text/plain
messages into hyperlinks...  CSCMail is stricter than say Outlook
Express, in that it requires a real URL (http://cscmail.net) and won't
attempt to turn www.cscmail.net into a hyperlink (that's not a URL,
there is no protocol specifier)  Outlook, and all MS product's as far as
I can tell, do the "wrong thing" and attempt to turn anything that
"looks like" a url into a hyperlink.  Of course, they miss a lot of
things, and turn the wrong things into links a lot of the time, so it's
a mess I avoid by only autohyperlinking true URLs.

Herm, soapbox mode off....

-CZ