Re: [Lynx-dev] lynx -dump changes formatting

[David Woolley]

Ulrich Scholz wrote:
> I use lynx -dump to read html-formatted messages in ascii.  Unfortunately,
> lynx -dump removes lines from the ascii output that solely consists of
> <br>.  In html, these lines are interpreted as empty line.

This is historically correct behaviour.  The interpretation of <br> as a 
hard newline only arose with GUI browser, and probably because their 
authors didn't actually understand the assumed behaviour of <br>, which 
was based on TeX an troff line break logic.  Currently, it is best to 
say that the handling of br is ambiguous in this respect.

However, I believe that Lynx does have an option to avoid collapsing 
adjacent br's.  Incientally, note that HTML 4.01 specification requires 
empty p elements to be collapsed, and I believe that the CSS border 
collapse rules conspire to achieve this.

> This behaviour changes the formatting of the emails and makes them hard to
> read.  Can I change the behaviour of lynx -dump?

They should send their email in HTML if they use HTML markup.  The real 
problem is that, to a greater or lesser extent, HTML email is not HTML, 
but simply HTML elements used for their typical presentational behaviour 
 on GUI browsers.  It would have been much better if the brand leader 
email programs had implemented MIME Rich Text, which has a much more 
presentational bias than HTML.  Proper HTML markup for the email would 
use p elements for paragraphs.

Collapsing of mulitple br's is not a problem for correctly written HTML 
as one should never need them, and should use CSS to achieve the visual 
effect of extra blank lines.

--
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.