Re: [Pan-users] Reading an HTML posting when using 'old' Pan

[Steven D'Aprano]

thufir wrote:
> On Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:34:44 +1100, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>
> > > The bug you refer to was probably that pan didn't display text/html
> > > mimetype blocks even as plain text, in the buggy versions.  It probably
> > > treated those mime parts as attachments, instead.
> > That is not  bug, it is a feature. That is the correct behaviour for any
> > application which (rightly, in my opinion) chooses not to render HTML.
>
>
> I'm sure I'm not the only user to disagree, and I don't want to pile-on, 
> but here goes...
>
> The problem is that the "aol" type users are more and more proliferate.  

"aol"? You're showing your age. They long ago moved to Hotmail, and now Gmail. 
With a bit of luck, they'll all be twitting or on Facebook by this time next 
year, and will never send another email or news post again.


> There will come a tipping point where this feature negatively effects the 
> user experience to such a point that users will simply abandon Pan.

Why?

Fortunately most mail/news clients (with a few exceptions) do send plain text 
content as well as the HTML attachment, so most of the time the plain text 
version will be available. The question is, what do with the HTML version?

The choices are:

1) support the entire HTML standard, with all the difficulty and
   security threats that implies;
2) support only a tiny subset of HTML, just enough to give some
   limited rich text (e.g. bold, italic, embedded images);
3) hide the HTML content altogether and pretend it doesn't exist;
4) show the plain text, and the HTML as an attachment;
5) show the HTML, tags and all, inline as if it were ordinary text.


1) is never going to happen (and a good thing that is too). Pan currently does 
5), I believe that 4) would be a better solution. What's your solution?



--
Steven