[Javascript] no JS on a JS mailing list? (was: Code optimization)

[Peter Brunone]

		If I may offer an opinion here...

   Often it IS best to link to a working example -- it ensures that the solution presented has been tried, and that there are no typos in the translation.

   However, my mail client (SmarterMail, since I'm usually behind a firewall) defaults to plain text, which means that *everything* including Steve's HTML tags are rendered as text.  I have the option to switch to HTML view, or set that as the default (which I never do), but there is always a way to see exactly what is in the message.

   It's been a while since I used Outlook for lists, but I believe it works the same way.

Cheers,

Peter

				From: Paul Novitski paul at juniperwebcraft.com

At 06:28 AM 8/8/2006, Steve Clay wrote:
>Monday, August 7, 2006, 7:07:08 PM, Paul Novitski wrote:
> > Please don't try to include HTML and active script in your listserve
> > posting. Eudora gives me an incomplete rendering with scripting
> > disabled -- as I would expect of an email client that protects its
> > users from attack.
>
>Sorry, Paul. Sane mail clients respect text/plain and render it as plain
>text, not broken HTML. We shouldn't have to type on tip toes to avoid
>uncovering bugs in mail clients.

Hi Steve,

I agree with you completely that we should feel free to include HTML 
tags and javascript code in our postings. I typically include both 
in my own contributions to this and other listserves.

I suspect that the occasions my email client (Eudora 7) renders 
posted HTML markup text as "active" HTML instead of plain text are 
when folks include the HTML tag itself as part of their posting, such 
as when they paste the entire HTML page into their email. Because 
email clients that are capable of rendering HTML markup use the HTML 
tag to begin a message, this causes obvious confusion.

(Do set me straight here. I'm hardly an expert in email technology 
and my parochial experience with Eudora might be limiting my 
view. Do other email clients consistently treat HTML markup 
insertions as plain text? Does their doing so depend on whether the 
author has set it to send all email as HTML? Did your own client 
treat Terry Riegel's posting of Mon, 7 Aug 2006 18:05:01 -0400 
entirely as plain text?)

In my experience, most times this happens is when someone attempts to 
insert an example in their posting that includes what I'm calling 
active javascript -- not just the plain text code but the code 
embedded in an HTML context in the hopes that it will execute in the 
email client. This seems like a bad idea for a number of reasons, 
primarily that it depends on our using our email clients as HTML & 
javascript clients. For security reasons, our clients will typically 
suppress a lot of functionality that a browser can be requested to allow.

For all "active" examples of markup and scripting I still encourage 
people to upload complete HTML pages to a server and post the URL, so 
that we can view, download, and render the pages with a variety of 
browsers of our choice.

Warm regards,
Paul 
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