Re: ANNOUNCE: Hypermail in C, version 1.0 (fwd)

Nick Arnett (narnett@verity.com)
Mon, 5 Sep 1994 11:53:25 -0800


At 11:16 AM 9/5/94 -0500, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:
>In message <9409050052.AA04516@nasty.verity.com>, Nick Arnett writes:
>>I know that there was some discussion of standards for inclusion of HTML in
>>mail and Usenet discussions, but I don't think there was any closure on it.
>
>Is this different from MIME?

Oops, didn't make myself clear. It's really the second issue that I was
asking about -- a standard for when HTML is to be interpreted or not. The
complication is that a single message might include HTML that should be
interpreted and some that is "example" HTML. Right now, I skirt the issue
in my converter by treating everything as if it were an example, then I
make URLs hot, too, and a few other things on a "best guess" basis.

>If you can do it without pissing anybody off, great! Well, you're
>guaranteed to piss somebody off. If you can do it without creating
>an anti-HTML or anti-WWW sentiment in the USENET/mail community,
>I suppose I'm in favor of this.

There are people who are offended by *any* unsolicited e-mail, but I can
take that kind of heat. But if I include a 2,000-word sales pitch for our
products... ;-)

Anyway, I'm looking for a standard way to set aside some example HTML in
messages. In this list, in particular, it's a common occurence. In the
HTML 2.0 spec, I see <SAMP> refers to "a sequence of literal characters,"
which would seem to be what we want. We could easily modify the converter
to do reserved character substitutions for anything enclosed in <SAMP>
tags, but interpret the rest. Was this the intent of <SAMP>?

As a transition, we can include links to the current "best guess" method
that I'm using now. We already include links to the original article,
which is just the text wrapped with <PRE>.

Next, we'll get people to put <BLOCKQUOTE> around quoted text... then an
anchor back to the quoted message. Yeah, that's what we'll do... Then
we'll have them send us all their money. ;-)

Nick

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Nick Arnett "We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunity."
Verity Inc. -- Pogo (Walt Kelly)
narnett@verity.com