From: jose.kahan@w3.org
Date: Tue Nov 02 1999 - 10:41:14 CST
Hello,
I'm currently going thru the print.c file with the goal of offering a
cleaner output for the HTML documents.
I found that we have some parser code for detecting signatures and the
beginning of an HTML document while using the showhtml option.
I think it's safer to remove this automatic detection, which works on some
cases, but not on all, and instead use the MIME attachments to send
HTML documents rather than try to autodetect them.
Well, for signatures, unfortunately, we don't have any specific
text/signature MIME type... and text/plain will continue being
parsed into HTML. However, there's no standard either that says that
signatures will always begin with a "--" line either. By using this rule
in hypermail, we're assuming a de-facto standard which isn't really true :)
So, that's why I propose to remove this part of the code.
What do you think?
-Jose
=============
More detailed explanation:
If we're using the showhtml option and we have a line that
has a "--" sequence, we assume this is a signature and switch to using
<PRE>.
If a line begins with <HTML> line begins with a -- sequence,
we assume this is the beginning or end of an HTML document and output
as is.
While this conversions may work in many cases, they make it impossible
to use the -- sequence or <HTML> one in other cases.
For example, if I wrote something like the following:
=====================
Here's an HTML example:
-- <HTML> <HEAD><TITLE>test</TITLE></HEAD> <BODY> <P>Hello, web.</P> </BODY> </HTML> -- In this example, you can see blah blah ================ That wouldn't come out correctly thru hypermail with showhtml.