Subject: Pine's handling of HTML PRE tag

From: Dan Peterson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 09:21:27 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)

I'm not sure if this is bug or not... I _know_ it's very annoying. :)

I often receive HTML mail that, in my option, contains improperly
formatted HTML.  One of the cases is the use of the HTML "PRE" tag...  or
to be more specific, the use of certain tags (ie. "BR", "P", etc) within a
"PRE" tag.

What is the correct behavior when a "BR" tag is inside a "PRE" tag...
should it be rendered or ignored?

>From observation using Netscape and IE, it appears it should be ignored.

Problem is, Pine doesn't ignore it.  So, a mail message that contains a
"BR" tag for every line AND the entire message is enclosed in a "PRE" tag,
appears as though everything is double spaced.

Is this a bug in Pine?  Is there any way around it?

--
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 Dan Peterson             Senior Software Engineer    AOL
 Email: [email-masked]      Phone: 703-265-0226         FAX: 703-265-2405
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From: Andy Malato <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 09 Sep 1999 09:39:16 -0400

All tags inside of a "PRE" should be ignored.  A "PRE" tag is used to Preserve
the orginal text and whitespace characters.  I don't know however if this is a
bug in PINE itself, but it sure does seem to me that PINE doesn't know how to
handel <PRE> tags, but then again, PINE was not built with HTML in mind, but
rather ANSI text.

    ---Andy

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From: Dan Peterson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 10:53:18 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)

Actually, I'm pretty sure most tags inside a "PRE" tag _should_ be
rendered... but I _think_ there are exceptions for things like "BR" and
"P".

The O'Reilly Dynamic HTML Reference says "Unlike the deprecated PLAINTEXT
element, the PRE element doesn't ignore HTML tags."  It doesn't say
specifically anything about ignoring "BR" and "P", but I _thought_ I read
that somewhere.

Perhaps I was just assuming "BR" and "P" should be ignored because that's
what Netscape and IE do.

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From: Jessica Rasku <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1999 20:44:03 -0700 (PDT)

> rendered... but I _think_ there are exceptions for things like "BR" and

	This seems to be my reading of the HTML 4.0 spec.  That most tags
should be accepted.  What I do see in the spec is that the
IMG|OBJECT|BIG|SMALL|SUB|SUP tags are listed as .exclusions.  So, by
rights shouldn't occur, but to be ``safe'' should be ignored.  

> Perhaps I was just assuming "BR" and "P" should be ignored because that's

	What SHOULD be done, isn't listed at least in the portion of the
spec that I have read regarding this.  But my personal feeling is that
what Pine is doing is ``right'' and what IE, and Netscape are doing is
``wrong''.  There is nothing clear as to what is the way it is SUPOSED to
be rendered...

							Jessica

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LinuxBox: (250) 362-9668.

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