The HTML spec says that the only string specifically forbidden within a comment is a string of hyphens. Two or more consecutive hyphens is a no-no. No character codes are recognized within comments (tho they do no harm). (see http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/intro/sgmltut.html#h-3.2.4 for more info)
The problem arises when a subject line contains "--" or "---" etc... or when a bogus email address contains consecutive dashes... or any header field that is stored in a comment contains them. This is (rightfully) not picked up by the convchars function. But perhaps a function could be set up specifically for the comments, that deals with the consecutive hyphens? (Obviously, removing consecutive hyphens from the message body is not desirable.)
It seems that the easiest way to deal with this would be to replace instances of "--" with "- ". It might look sloppy, but if the only place it looks sloppy is the index listing(s), that's probably livable.
But I'm not sure about this...
Are consecutive hyphens allowable in email usernames? I don't think they are, but I've not done the homework on it yet. If they are allowable, this breaks email links for those folx since when index pages are rebuilt when hypermail is called with -i, the index info is taken from the comments in the message files.
If so, I suppose it would be possible to replace the dashes with something that could then be re-replaced when the index files are created... (a pair of functions like convchars/unconvchars). Its probably better to do it this way anyhow... just for consistancy's sake.
Anyhow... if no one else is concerned with having hypermail generate HTML compliant code I'll just see what I can figure out on my own... like I said, its not a *big* deal, and no browsers I know of will choke on this). But I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts/suggestions about how to best handle it...
--jenni Received on Sat 05 Dec 1998 08:02:12 PM GMT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Sat 13 Mar 2010 03:46:11 AM GMT GMT