Simple HTML Code

[Jay Ashworth]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Jerry Crespi" <jcrespi at alliedhr.com>

> One of my clients needed to have his invoices
> sent via email. I set up a form with the invoice
> on it, and added headers to the top of the form so it became an email.
> This meant saving each form as a file ending with
> .msg and I sent it to a directory monitored by an
> SMTP program. Once the file was there the smtp
> program simply sent the file as email.
> 
> Because the client then made changes such as
> links to UPS and FEDEX tracking numbers in the
> invoice, I needed to make html an integral part
> of the form. I found an easy method
> to embed html tags in the form without processing. Here is what I did:
[ ... ]
> Your form will now have the html tags embedded
> into it. When viewed by a browser or email
> client, the tags do not show, but instead are completely functional
> html.

This is clever, but you should know that it may be leveraging breakage 
in stupid mail user agents:

HTML-like atoms which are found in the body of email messages which are 
*not* MIMEtype text/html *should not be parsed*, but many mail user agents
improperly do it anyway.

If you're doing this to send email to someone, you need to make sure
that whatever actually generates the mail is told to create a MIME 
encoded email message, with the proper text/html mimetype...

and you should probably have a useful text/plain component in a 
multipart/alternative wrapper, as well, if the messages are aimed at 
real human beings, especially *if you don't know who they are*: even if 
that plain part is (and usually, I hate this) "The HTML component of this
email is a formatted report from $SOURCE".

It's better, of course, to have the text/plain part be a properly 
downrezzed version of the fancy report, but I understand that it's 
not always easy.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA               #natog                      +1 727 647 1274