When a forum post includes a code block, the email notifications show the block as one long, word-wrapped line. That makes the code… um… somewhat difficult to parse.
There are two good solutions to this. One would be to insert line breaks at the end of code lines. The other would be to send the notifications as text/html instead of (or in addition to) text/plain, and have them look identical to the forum posts.
please please please do not send text/html only. It can be considered as being rude (not to mention the issue that each client appears to render it differently)
rod_widdowson wrote:
please please please do not send text/html only. It can be considered as being rude (not to mention the issue that each client appears to render it differently)
Oh, come on. In 1997, it was considered rude, when us nerds wanted to
think we still controlled the internet, and not the commercial overlords
that eventually took it over. Today, that ship has long sailed. I’d
wager the many thousands of subscribers to this forum use no more than 5
different mail readers, and ALL of them understand HTML thoroughly and
consistently. What you are describing is just a silly anachronism in 2018.
Also, having written a GUI mail reader myself, I know that supporting
multipart/alternative with both text/plain and text/html is no more
trouble than a text/html.
First, thanks for the feedback. I definitely appreciate it. The whole “email support” feature on this forum definitely has a long way to go.
Second, let me remind you that these sorts of things are now (thankfully) entirely out of our (OSR’s) control. That means the best I can do is file a bug, or complain, or something. And I will do that.
One on-going item that may affect this is our plan to (perhaps) change the editor used online. We have just started (internally) testing a different editor, and perhaps may move to that. When we do, it is likely that the appearance of the email contributions changes.
please do not send text/html only
Yeah, no. That’s not going to happen. We do not send HTML email at this point, and I have no plans to do so.
I’d wager the many thousands of subscribers to this forum
use no more than 5 different mail readers
Hmmmm… I think I’d take that bet. We have a very diverse group of folks who read email from this forum and they all use some pretty strange stuff. Over the years ,on NTDEV or SOMEwhere, we had occasionally had complaints from people who insist on reading plain text only and not HTML.
I myself use no less than three email readers (actually, four, if you count the two separate versions of Outlook for the Web).
Anyhow… (a) Thanks again for passing along this issue report, (b) I’ll file a bug, (c) This may sort itself out or become worse when/if we change forum editors.
Peter
please please please do not send text/html only.
In my experience, there is simply no way to do it even if you want to, because the new hosting platform mangles XML/HTML-style formatting. Instead, these days, in order to provide, say, a quotation, one has to resort to square brackets -style formatting,
i.e. to do it in [begin statement] text [end statement] fashion
Anton Bassov
On Dec 17, 2018, at 4:46 PM, anton_bassov wrote:
>
>> please please please do not send text/html only.
>
> In my experience, there is simply no way to do it even if you want to, because the new hosting platform mangles XML/HTML-style formatting. Instead, these days, in order to provide, say, a quotation, one has to resort to square brackets -style formatting,
Of course there is. The danged forum web page is displaying an HTML representation. They could just as easily send exactly that.
—
Tim Roberts, timr@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.