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Re: Mailing list DTD?

• From: Jeff Turner <jeff@s...>
• To: Steven Champeon <schampeo@h...>
• Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 22:04:10 +1000

Steven Champeon wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 10 May 2000, Jeff Turner wrote:
> > It seems an ever-present issue on mailing lists that some people send
> > HTML posts, and other people get annoyed with this.
> 
> Yes, and any decent mailing list admin will block such stuff at the source.
> 
> > Has anyone thought of defining a minimal DTD for mailing list postings?
> 
> I have been working on one, off and on, for simple RFC822 messages, but as
> I don't have the need (or desire) to mark up embedded MIME crud, that's as
> complex as I'm going to make it.

You're working on a -DTD- for RFC822 messages? DTDs define syntax;
isn't that what the RFC already does?
  
> > No-one really wants/needs the full capabilities of HTML, yet it would be
> > nice to have -something- more sophisticated than plain text.
> 
> The question I'd ask is "why do you need to mark up a plaintext post as
> HTML, when you can mark up a plain text post as plain text and then use
> followup processing to add functionality like links"?

That's exactly what I'm proposing; leave the MIME type as text/plain
if you wish, but have the -sender- help the receiver's MUA to do
"followup processing" by marking up the bits that need it.

> 
> > I would be happy with two features: an anchor tag <a href=.."></a> for
> > embedding URLs, and a way of indicating quoted text. Ie:
> >
> > <quote sender="joe@f..." lang="en">
> >   blah blah..
> > </quote>
> >
> > "quote" elements can be nested, which makes a nice alternative to
> > growing sets of '>'s.
> 
> Yes, that'd be very nice, and very useful. Unfortunately, this means
> your filter would have to be able to decipher the myriad forms of
> nesting that people use, which is Hard. Getting that info from HTML
> posts is Very Hard.

Filters aren't the issue. I'm merely proposing a DTD which, if used to
mark up messages by sender, would make the receiver's job of "getting
that info" as trivial as finding the tags.

--Jeff Turner

> 
> Steve
> 
> --
> tired of being an underappreciated functionary in a soulless machine?
> hesketh.com is hiring: <http://hesketh.com/careers/>

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