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

James J. Besemer jb@cascade-sys.com
Thu, 07 Mar 2002 22:46:16 -0800


Les Niles wrote:

> Translation systems, whether speech recognition, natural language
> translation, or reformatting the content of email, are
> fundamentally imperfect.  That's why worrying about making an HTML
> filter intuitive and easily configurable is important -- those
> attributes are exactly what make a translation system usable and
> useful.
>
> I think the various types of "filtering HTML" fit into a couple of
> broad categories.  One is translation: converting HTML content into
> some other format in which most or all of the semantic content is
> maintained.  The other is stripping: removing HTML sections
> entirely.  The former is harder, more error-prone, and open to
> incompatible interpretations of what constitutes the "right"
> translation.  Stripping, OTOH, is simpler, more predictable, and
> can usefully be applied to other MIME types that a list admin might
> deem verbotten, but not nearly as powerful.  I'm suggesting that
> both types of filtering are useful in MM's processing, but can and
> probably should be presented as separate functions in the
> configuration UI since their roles and characteristics are rather
> different.

Very well put.

--jb

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