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<p dir="auto">On 2 Jul 2024, at 3:05, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:</p>
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<p dir="auto">On 1 Jul 2024, at 20:59, Pete Resnick via mailmate wrote:</p>
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<p dir="auto">On 1 Jul 2024, at 4:57, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:</p>
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<p dir="auto">On 29 Jun 2024, at 4:31, Pete Resnick via mailmate wrote:</p>
<p dir="auto">Yes, this has not been an option for a long time. The original idea was that receiving email clients could, when possible, just convert Markdown to HTML when needed for display, but this has all kinds of unresolved issues and would only work well when both sending and receiving email client was MailMate itself.</p>
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<p dir="auto">I'm not sure I understand that. Sure, there is a variety of markdown that some implementations might not understand, but then it just displays a plaintext.</p>
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<p dir="auto">I don't think it's that simple. Markdown comes in many variants and in some cases it won't just fail to convert something, it might convert it differently. Also, the plain text free nature of Markdown means that there are a lot of small edge cases to consider in implementations (<a href="https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/" style="color: #777777;">https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/</a>).</p>
<p dir="auto">For example, most Markdown implementations do not “respect” hard-wrapping lines. This does not work well for emails and therefore MailMate handles it differently. Some other email client developer might make a different decision. The behavior might even differ between different versions of MailMate (due to changes in its Markdown utility).</p>
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<p dir="auto">In these cases, where the Markdown is very variant specific, text/markdown (RFC 7763) is probably the right thing to do instead of text/plain markup=markdown. I understand that would open an entirely new can of worms.</p>
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<p dir="auto">The use of “markup=markdown” by MailMate is in fact quite naive.</p>
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<p dir="auto">The simple stuff like bold, italic, etc., everyone can do pretty easily.</p>
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<p dir="auto">That's a good point. There is certainly a somewhat robust subset of Markdown features which could be safe to handle. Perhaps that subset should be the recommended interpretation of "markup=markdown". That said, the same subset would likely be quite safe for interpretation of any plain text message.</p>
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<p dir="auto">Would you like to co-author an RFC? :-)</p>
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<p dir="auto">For now, you only have the option of disabling the use of Markdown. This should prevent the generation of HTML if it's not needed for other reasons (like embedding replied HTML).</p>
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<p dir="auto">Bummer.</p>
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<p dir="auto">Well, it's not like I won't be willing to re-introduce it in some form.</p>
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<p dir="auto">Love that!</p>
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<p dir="auto">You are welcome to describe your use case(s).</p>
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<p dir="auto">I subscribe to a bunch of mailing lists (primarily IETF) with a bunch of old curmudgeonly people who use old curmudgeonly clients and I would like them not to get all of the extra crud, but still allow people who can change *italic* to <em>italic</em> to do so.</p>
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<p dir="auto">My guess is that very few (if any) of those email clients look for the <code style="margin: 0 0; padding: 0 0.25em; border-radius: 3px; background-color: #F7F7F7;">markup=markdown</code> parameter. If they do support converting to, e.g., italic for display then I would guess that they do it whether or not the parameter exists.</p>
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<p dir="auto">Did I mention writing an RFC? :-)</p>
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<p dir="auto">(And of course there is the obsessive part of me says that you should generate the absolute minimum that you can, and sending HTML when all I've got is one italicized word is not minimum. But I assume that's why you put the option in there in the first place. I notice that you don't put in "format=flowed" if there are no wrapped lines, nor put in a "charset" when there are no non-US-ASCII characters. I just want the same thing for HTML; if you don't need it, don't include it.)</p>
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<p dir="auto">Maybe the option you really need is for MailMate to only generate HTML if you use “non-trivial” Markdown.</p>
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<p dir="auto">That would be fine!</p>
<p dir="auto">pr</p>
<p dir="auto">--<br>
Pete Resnick <a href="https://www.episteme.net/" style="color: #3983C4;">https://www.episteme.net/</a><br>
All connections to the world are tenuous at best</p>
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