All posts in the topic HTML Version? (Short link)
Summary
- There are 9 posts — by 3 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Michael JasonSmith at Feb 15 21:58 UTC
What are folks current thinking about an HTML option for posts these days? I am coming around to the position that embedded links in the text would be a good thing now that HTML e-mail is pretty much universal. It could also be use to present links to attached files placed on the server and thumbnails of photos in a box of sorts in the top right of a message. I've noticed with my DoWire posts that if via Gmail I send a rich text formated e-mail (typically) to a posting address that GroupServer (I believe OR is something else going on) converts the links into this format: http://groups.dowire.org/groups/newswire/messages/post/4NiSNuISbZxW90ru0HbfXf What are you folks thinking? Steve Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.Org Follow me - http://twitter.com/democracy
The problem of HTML mail is two-fold: formatting and security. First is the issue of formatting the message. What should we do if a message has attached images referenced from the HTML? Should we strip the images? Would the message be readable without the bright purple image in the background? Should we sanitise the HTML so it is vaguely conforming to a known standard? The other problem is security. The "style" attribute, for example, is a know vector for JavaScript attacks. For security we could strip the style attributes, and other known problems, but then the messages may not look good. We could leave the known vectors in, and claim we are just a messenger, but I suspect that would not go down very well with many members. By allowing HTML links in a message the author could claim, in the link text, that he or she is linking a financial report but instead send the other members to YouTube < This could also be used to send users to sites that will infect their machines with malware. (On Slashdot they put the domain-name after every link, to prevent this from happening <http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/11/29/2133243/G-WAN-Another-Free-Web-Server?art_pos=2>.) I am more interested in experimenting with displaying HTML-formatted messages on the Web pages. This would allow us to deal with the issues in a known medium, and then move onto the trickier one ☺
On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 1:12 PM, <email obscured>> wrote:
> The problem of HTML mail is two-fold: formatting and security.
Well, the HTML format email that Steven was talking about was to
increase the richness of communication from the site to the user; not
to preserve the formatting on the original post.
So you could look at it from the point of view that "all incoming
posts are plaintext" and "outgoing emails may be formatted"
I'd be most interested in something that simply allowed embedded links, bold, italics and perhaps bullets with the font, size, and color kept uniform. While hiding links to spoof sites is a problem with spam, we do our best to keep spammers and scammers off of our groups. I too think presenting HTML on the web posts is actually more important than in e-mails. Anything to make the groups look more blog-like is good. First impressions count. Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.Org Follow me - http://twitter.com/democracy
I love the idea of making the posts on the web look better ☺ As you say,
Steve, first impressions count, and many more people will see a pretty
post on the Web than in email.
I do not see what the users would gain by creating a HTML version of a
plain-text message.
* Does any modern email client not make text such as
http://groupserver.org/ click-able? Even the text-based Pine and
Elm have links you can click on thanks to GNOME Terminal
understanding them. (I would believe that Apple Mail does not
understand links, but I have a very low opinion of that client.)
* I created a little experiment ages ago, where words are marked
up with <strong> if they are surrounded by asterisks like *this*
— and I have seen very few people use it. Off the top of my
head, no one but myself. There is little point adding a system
to interpret mark up if no one will use the markup. (I tried
bold first because I have seen italic done /in/ _many_
''ways''.)
* GroupServer could try and identify bullet lists in the body of
the email, but I do not see what using • instead of * would gain
anyone. I use the bullet character in my posts to ensure that
the UTF-8 handling is going ok, not because it looks better ☺ In
addition, recognising bullet lists in plain text is not easy, as
many irritating wiki systems will testify.
On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 4:41 PM, Michael JasonSmith <email obscured>> wrote: > * Does any modern email client not make text such as > http://groupserver.org/ click-able? Even the text-based Pine and > Elm have links you can click on thanks to GNOME Terminal > understanding them. (I would believe that Apple Mail does not > understand links, but I have a very low opinion of that client.) Thunderbird doesn't, unless you install the "text link" add-on (or possibly others).
Thanks, Jim!
Thunderbird not understanding links is insane, but good to know. I wonder how
many people do *not* have that installed? Every Thunderbird client I have seen
has had URLs that can be clicked on, but I have not seen that many to be
honest.
On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 1:45 PM, <email obscured>> wrote: > Thanks, Jim! > > Thunderbird not understanding links is insane, but good to know. I wonder how many people do *not* have that installed? Every Thunderbird client I have seen has had URLs that can be clicked on, but I have not seen that many to be honest. Well, thinking about it, it's possible that links of the format http://something may have been handled all along, but a few hours ago I had an email with text saying just domain.com; I noticed that Google linkified them, and Thunderbird did not, until I added the plugin. So it's possible that I'm talking only about the severely degenerative case here. Yes, a test confirms ... well-formed URLs are linkified properly without the addon. False alarm. Nothing to see here. Move along!
So I do not forget (or a least, so GroupServer remembers) "htmllaundry" is a module for sanitising HTML markup, based on the "Cleaner" class in lxml. (Get it? html *laundry*, cleans code and removes *lint*. Oh my aching sides…). I especially like the support for Zope 3 Schemas, so fields that expect HTML input are explicitly marked.<http://pypi.python.org/pypi/htmllaundry/1.2>
This site is provided by OnlineGroups.Net, where you can start your own free online groups site, using the open source web-based mailing list manager GroupServer.