Could we start accepting rich-text postings on the gcc lists?

[Jonathan Larmour]

[ gcc list CC dropped ]
On 24/11/12 17:58, Daniel Berlin wrote:
> In the "olden days", when html email was some shitty gobbledygook
> produced by an old version of exchange, this may have made sense.  In
> the days now of relatively sane multipart/alternative emails, it just
> seems like folks being annoyed that the rest of the world changed.

Personally I don't think it would be a problem accepting multipart/alternative
emails as long as they contain text/plain and as long as list users realise
that any careful formatting they have put in will be stripped. My experience
of what many MUAs do when generating text/plain alternatives from the HTML
master is that what results can be pretty dire, particularly when it comes to
insertion of arbitrary spacing. Posts with wacky spacing like that would
become more common, and no doubt some MUAs will be simply unable to generate
sane text/plain alternatives. But the burden of support for those people would
fall on the individual projects, so if individual projects are prepared to put
up with this, that should be up to them. Although as this thread has shown,
there is disagreement in the GCC community, so the SC would need to be the
ones to decide.

For the avoidance of doubt for those who may not know, assuming we are
switching to Mailman, it can already have its content filtering set up to
strip text/html from multipart mails (or remove everything except a defined
list of acceptable MIME types); and in addition it has its own HTML to text
munger which can be enabled on a per-list basis, although again the result may
not reflect the author's intention.

My main concerns only really apply if it involves letting HTML get passed
through, or go into the archives.

Jifl