[Mailman-Developers] Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself...

[James J. Besemer]

"Barry A. Warsaw" wrote:

> Here's the basic problem: there are lots of different use cases that
> fall under the rubric "filtering HTML".  Some people want it stripped,
> some want it transformed, do we preserve links, etc, etc.  It's hard
> to support everything everyone wants to do with HTML messages, /and/
> do it in a way that's intuitive and easy to configure through the web.

I see.  I rather thought you meant there was some problem hooking up a
filter or adding a switch to control it.

> I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's a lot of work, and MM2.1 has
> to get to beta RSN.  Plus, I think there are viable options (for the
> short term) without having this functionality in Mailman proper.

I wasn't suggesting any change of plans for your release.

I'm even offering to DO some or all of the work at some unspecified time
in the future, when I'm more up to speed on the system..

Though if a miracle happened and it made it in the next relase, that'd be
great.

> E.g. demime.

If I'm following all this -- you're going to fix some web page links and
then we can look at the latest version of Demime and Stripmime.  What's
the URL?

> But I'll give it another look, and maybe something simple can satisfy
> 80% of the people out there.

A perfectly adequate solution in my mind would simply be for the existing
"plain" switch to apply to regular posts in addition to digests.  Then,
post process regular posts with whatever you now do with digests.  The
only thing the user needs is to turn the whole thing on or off.  Within
that, cavet emptor.

Like Les said, simply removing all the formatting and leaving the original
text would make almost everybody happy.  In my tiny corner of the world,
98% of the cases are where a naive user entered some regular text, only it
got posted as HTML, so it shows up as purple 6 point text or some crap.

After a quick review of my HTML pocket ref, I'd say for extra credit I
would handle the following cases specially:

    <A> -- echo the HREF

    <IMG> -- echo the ALT text

    <P> -- extra blank line

And that would about cover it.  The PhD version would format tables.

If it's a totally gunked-up graphics page, the result might still look
like hell but that's OK!  An important concept from in the Analog world:
Distortion is a perfectly acceptable response to certain inputs.  It's
probably spam anyway, so WTF?

More later....

--jb

--
James J. Besemer  503-280-0838 voice
http://cascade-sys.com  503-280-0375 fax
mailto:jb@cascade-sys.com