xml-dev - Re: Mailing list DTD?

[Steven Champeon <schampeo@hesketh.com>]

On Wed, 10 May 2000, Jeff Turner wrote:
> It seems an ever-present issue on mailing lists that some people send
> HTML posts, and other people get annoyed with this.

Yes, and any decent mailing list admin will block such stuff at the source.
 
> Has anyone thought of defining a minimal DTD for mailing list postings?

I have been working on one, off and on, for simple RFC822 messages, but as
I don't have the need (or desire) to mark up embedded MIME crud, that's as
complex as I'm going to make it. 

> No-one really wants/needs the full capabilities of HTML, yet it would be
> nice to have -something- more sophisticated than plain text.

The question I'd ask is "why do you need to mark up a plaintext post as
HTML, when you can mark up a plain text post as plain text and then use
followup processing to add functionality like links"?

> I would be happy with two features: an anchor tag <a href=.."></a> for
> embedding URLs, and a way of indicating quoted text. Ie:
> 
> <quote sender="joe@foo..com" lang="en">
>   blah blah..
> </quote>
> 
> "quote" elements can be nested, which makes a nice alternative to
> growing sets of '>'s.

Yes, that'd be very nice, and very useful. Unfortunately, this means
your filter would have to be able to decipher the myriad forms of 
nesting that people use, which is Hard. Getting that info from HTML
posts is Very Hard.

Steve

-- 
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