further random questions from the newly-unemployed

[jabr at abreau.net (John Abreau)]

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Derek Martin <blu at sophic.org> writes:

> That said, I'd like to see a standard declared with a very limited
> subset of HTML which mail readers should handle, and have that become
> the norm for e-mail transmission.  It *IS* nice to be able to have
> such things as /italics/, *bold*, and _underlined_ (etc.) text in an
> e-mail, without having to resort to the somewhat visually unappealing
> indicators that have become Usenet/Internet defacto standards for
> indicating such things in ASCII text.  I'd love to have a mailer with
> all the features and flexibility of Mutt, that also handled such a
> subset of HTML for both composition and display of e-mail.

I've always preferred "setext" for that. Setext (Structured Enhanced Text)
is a specification for ASCII markup that's optimized for reading as 
plain text, but structured enough that applications can correctly render 
stuff like bold, italics, underlined, and hypertext links, and correctly 
detect three levels of section/chapter headers. There's at least one 
crufty old perl cgi script available that renders setext as html.

Setext was developed by the author of "TidBITS", an weekly email magazine 
in the MacOS user community. 


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John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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