Bjarni |grep -i tech
One of the "fun" features of #email is the multipart/alternative #MIME part.
It allows the sender to provide the same content in multiple formats, to "help" clients which have only limited capabilities.
In practice, this is only ever used to send both plain-text and HTML versions of a message. Also, in practice, senders routinely send garbage as one of the "alternatives."
Deciding which part to display (or quote in replies) is a "fun" challenge when writing a mail client.
Bjarni |grep -i tech
... and no, ignoring the HTML part entirely is not actually a viable strategy on today's Internet.
There is quite often content in the HTML part which the user needs to read. It's important. And if it looks wrong and wonky, that's just bad UX.
Trying to stick with a plain-text-only strategy that was one of the worse mistakes we made in #Mailpile, it really hurt our usability and made the app look like an unpolished toy.
Adrian Cochrane
@HerraBRE I wonder, are there any gotchas regarding extracting plaintext from the HTML?
Bjarni |grep -i tech
@alcinnz Probably not for "normal" human-to-human email!
But marketing / promotions / auto-generated things will be pretty chaotic, because programmers. And spam / malware may have deliberately hidden things (white on white, font-size=0, etc).
It feels like a tractable problem largely because the harder it is to parse correctly, the less likely it is to actually important.
Esi
@HerraBRE @alcinnz I once worked at a company here in Iceland that took care of designing and sending out email newsletters for various companies. I was tasked with designing the emails.
Designing fancy HTML emails is hell on earth. Never again. It felt like I was designing a website for Internet Explorer back in the days, except it was like 50 times worse.
fgaz
Bjarni |grep -i tech
Yup, confirmed.
Text extracted from the HTML part is almost always way nicer than the included plain-text (if there is any).
For one thing, text parts are often junk like "No Text Part Included" or just HTML conversions done poorly, with critical links missing.
But also - when I convert HTML to plain text, I can elegantly wrap the text to whatever my window size is.. or I can *not* do that if text is marked up as `pre`.
Imagine that, using a real markup languages has advantages!
Bjarni |grep -i tech
I spent the day improving my HTML-to-text conversion code, so #moggie can display #email in text mode, even if there is only a HTML part available.
Based on today's work, my code is already (IMHO) better at converting HTML to readable text, than many of the tools being used to generate the messages in the first place!
Which has me unexpectedly preferring HTML parts, even for plain text display... since the HTML is more complete (links etc.) and my rendering is (often) easier to read?!
Okay!
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