On Mon, 2010-08-09 at 03:12 +0100, Marko Vojinovic wrote: > So you are saying that I can write just a plain text message, label it > as being html in the header, and the typical mail reader is going to > pretend that any/all missing html tags are there, and then render and > display the message as html? Well, I wasn't aware that mail readers > got that sophisticated. Nothing sophisticated about that, at all. If you tell the client the content is HTML, then the client tries to interpret it as being so. Of course, without there actually being any tags around the content, it'd just treated as one great big blob of text, anyway. The minimum presumed HTML tags of <html> <head> </head> <body> </body> </html> (the message goes between the body tags) don't provide any special rendering. Essentially, all they'd do is say "here be text." If they're not explictly put there by the authoring client, the rendering client presumes that they're in the right place around the body content. That's how HTML works. It's not until you start using tags (around the content) which have special purposes (paragraphs, line breaks, and all the other HTML elements), that you're going to get any special rendering effects. > Can this behavior be turned off? I would guess yes, but... :-) There are some clients that force the rendering of all content to be as if it were plain text. Sometimes this is necessary, because some twits will send you HTML that's: Black text on a black background, or other unreadable combinations. Text that's 0.4 or 600 points in size (well, not literally those sizes, but you should be able to get the gist of what I mean). Hideous picture backgrounds behind text, that make it impossible to read the text over the top of it. Images loaded off the WWW that show (via their web access logs) when you've read their mail. JavaScripting that exploits weaknesses in your client, or is just so damn broken that it causes an error without trying to be malicious. And the list goes on... Personally I find most HTML to be a waste of time, and a lot of it just plain annoying (it renders as a complete mess, or just shoehorns lots of crap onto a page). But it does have some uses. For instance, I used to be regularly emailed the local cinema's schedule. As a HTML table, it was easy to read what was on when, and what day. But as plain text, it became an incoherent jumble, as line breaks and wraps occurred in bad places. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
