Jargons of Info Tech industry

[Mike Meyer]

Roedy Green <my_email_is_posted_on_my_website at munged.invalid> writes:

> On Tue, 04 Oct 2005 17:57:13 -0000, gordonb.u09l7 at burditt.org (Gordon
> Burditt) wrote or quoted :
>
>>HTML enables a heck of a lot of problems:  "web bugs" in email,
>>links to fake sites that appear as real ones in what shows up
>>on the screen, Javascript viruses, denial-of-service attacks
>>(pages that open two windows when you close one), etc.
>>
>>>That is like hating all choirs because televangelists use them.
>>
>>I liken it more to hating all viruses because some of them 
>>install keyloggers.
>
>  I take it then you avoid browsers or use Lynx?

It's not quite that bad. You run multiple browsers: your default
browser turns off all the crap that can run code on your machine. You
use a second browser that has most of that turned on, and bookmark the
sites that need those features that you now trust. Maybe your browser
lets you have multiple profiles, in which case you can use those
instead of multiple browsers. Unless your goat browser is IE (or
Mozilla on Unix), you should keep a copy of IE (Mozilla on Unix)
around, with an untouched configuration, for the sites that either
enforce their belief that they only work on IE, or are one of those
rare sats where correctly believe that. Finally, you configure your
mail and news readers to *not* decode MIME messages unless given an
explicit command to do so.

I understand some browsers now let you enable dangers features on a
site-by-site basis. I'll check those out one of these days.

FWIW, I like w3m as a default browser, because it has the ability to
launch external browsers on a page or link.

> No you FIX the problems rather than wear a hair shirt. Same for
> email. Why should rich expressions only be permitted to those with
> websites.

The technial problems have been solved for over a decade. NeXT shipped
systems that used text/richtext, which has none of the problems that
HTML has.  The problems are *social* - you've got to arrange for
people to use mail/news readers that understand a rich text format
that isn't a vector for viruses.

> Some people use email PRIMARILY for sharing photos.

That doesn't take HTML. I get - and send - pictures via email all the
time, with nary a tag of HTML in sight.

      <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.