<font face="arial" size="2">If I may offer an opinion here...<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> It's been a while since I used Outlook for lists, but I believe it works the same way.<br /><br />Cheers,<br /><br />Peter<br /><br /></font>
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<b>From</b>: Paul Novitski <a href="mailto:paul@juniperwebcraft.com">paul@juniperwebcraft.com</a><br /></font>
<br />At 06:28 AM 8/8/2006, Steve Clay wrote:<br />>Monday, August 7, 2006, 7:07:08 PM, Paul Novitski wrote:<br />> > Please don't try to include HTML and active script in your listserve<br />> > posting. Eudora gives me an incomplete rendering with scripting<br />> > disabled -- as I would expect of an email client that protects its<br />> > users from attack.<br />><br />>Sorry, Paul. Sane mail clients respect text/plain and render it as plain<br />>text, not broken HTML. We shouldn't have to type on tip toes to avoid<br />>uncovering bugs in mail clients.<br /><br /><br />Hi Steve,<br /><br />I agree with you completely that we should feel free to include HTML <br />tags and javascript code in our postings. I typically include both <br />in my own contributions to this and other listserves.<br /><br />I suspect that the occasions my email client (Eudora 7) renders <br />posted HTML markup text as "active" HTML instead of plain text are <br />when folks include the HTML tag itself as part of their posting, such <br />as when they paste the entire HTML page into their email. Because <br />email clients that are capable of rendering HTML markup use the HTML <br />tag to begin a message, this causes obvious confusion.<br /><br />(Do set me straight here. I'm hardly an expert in email technology <br />and my parochial experience with Eudora might be limiting my <br />view. Do other email clients consistently treat HTML markup <br />insertions as plain text? Does their doing so depend on whether the <br />author has set it to send all email as HTML? Did your own client <br />treat Terry Riegel's posting of Mon, 7 Aug 2006 18:05:01 -0400 <br />entirely as plain text?)<br /><br />In my experience, most times this happens is when someone attempts to <br />insert an example in their posting that includes what I'm calling <br />active javascript -- not just the plain text code but the code <br />embedded in an HTML context in the hopes that it will execute in the <br />email client. This seems like a bad idea for a number of reasons, <br />primarily that it depends on our using our email clients as HTML & <br />javascript clients. For security reasons, our clients will typically <br />suppress a lot of functionality that a browser can be requested to allow.<br /><br />For all "active" examples of markup and scripting I still encourage <br />people to upload complete HTML pages to a server and post the URL, so <br />that we can view, download, and render the pages with a variety of <br />browsers of our choice.<br /><br />Warm regards,<br />Paul