[MlMt] To *not* generate HTML

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 1 Jul 2024, at 20:59, Pete Resnick via mailmate wrote:

> On 1 Jul 2024, at 4:57, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:
>
>> On 29 Jun 2024, at 4:31, Pete Resnick via mailmate wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> 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.

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 
(https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/).

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). 
The use of “markup=markdown” by MailMate is in fact quite naive.

> The simple stuff like bold, italic, etc., everyone can do pretty 
> easily.

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.

>> 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).
>
> Bummer.

Well, it's not like I won't be willing to re-introduce it in some form.

>> You are welcome to describe your use case(s).
>
> 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 *italic* to do so.

My guess is that very few (if any) of those email clients look for the 
`markup=markdown` 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.

> (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.)

Maybe the option you really need is for MailMate to only generate HTML 
if you use “non-trivial” Markdown.

-- 
Benny
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