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<div id="newHeader"> <b>To: </b>"tb-planning"<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:tb-planning@mozilla.org"><tb-planning@mozilla.org></a>
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<b>From: </b>"Joshua Cranmer"<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:pidgeot18@gmail.com"><pidgeot18@gmail.com></a><br>
<b>Sent: </b>Thursday, 19/07/12 03:56:39 03:56 GMT +0100 [Week
29]<br>
<b>Subject:</b>Re: Papercuts discussion - Composer related
enhancements</div>
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<blockquote class=" cite" id="mid_50077767_3050402_gmail_com"
cite="mid:50077767.3050402@gmail.com" type="cite">
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 7/18/2012 6:15 PM, Axel wrote:<br>
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<blockquote class=" cite" id="mid_50073579_7050304_gmail_com"
cite="mid:50073579.7050304@gmail.com" type="cite">
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</blockquote>
Microsoft is in the very unenviable position that
backwards-compatibility is absolutely vital to significant
segments of its userbase; whatever their press releases about what
they want to do in the future say, the fact remains that it's not
really an option for them.<br>
<blockquote class=" cite" id="mid_50073579_7050304_gmail_com"
cite="mid:50073579.7050304@gmail.com" type="cite"> I would
really like a similar level of "ease of use" when creating
emails that are sent between Thunderbird users, and whether we
think this is a good or bad thing, we should agree that HTML is
the platform, and CSS is the way to do the layout - why stick to
deprecated standards?<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Outlook isn't the only problematic email client. Gmail support is
also surprisingly abysmal--it only supports inline CSS, nothing in
a <style> tag! </blockquote>
Joshua,<br>
<br>
Just to bring this back on topic, the "style scoping issue" is
something we should be aware of as lot of other mail clients strip
out style tags - [I actually thought Outlook 2003 did the same,
although your link below says otherwise] - often, <head> tags
(and even body <style>s) are stripped out when quoting, so
your quoted emails may loose their fidelity as original <head>
tags may be stripped completely on reply.<br>
<br>
However as a first constructive step, we could certainly support
inline CSS styling of mail elements better, and make it easier to
roll out a tag based change to the remainder of the document via
this mechanism; it would certainly not be worse than using HTML
attributes, and could be consolidated later towards classes once CSS
in Mail has been more widely accepted.<br>
<br>
So my plan would be to focus on inline styling (but with CSS) and to
make this easy for the average user. One could probably create a
prioritized list of attributes that should be supported; on the top
would be margin, padding and display properties for proper layout
support. Personally I would also like to see support for
border-radius, box-shadow, text-shadow and background / gradients
even if a lot of mail clients strip them out. <br>
<br>
All this good stuff is supported out of the box, so I am only
advocating exposing this to the user - let them decide whether they
are going to use it or stick with "no styling".<br>
<br>
<blockquote class=" cite" id="mid_50077767_3050402_gmail_com"
cite="mid:50077767.3050402@gmail.com" type="cite">Here's a page
which gives you an idea of who supports what: <a
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E"
href="http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/"><http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/></a>.
Executive summary: webmail clients are moderately crappy (which is
probably due to the fact that they really have to sanitize
everything), anything Outlook-based is crappy, most mobile clients
(excluding Windows Mobile and the Android gmail client) appear to
be very good, and desktop clients are in between.<br>
</blockquote>
Hmm, that link is interesting; if it is to be believed, then Outlook
isn't all that bad: supporting <style> in <head> has
been on my wish-list for a long time. Rule scoping in Email is a
tricky subject, which I only realized fully since I started taking
over <a href="http://smarttemplate4.mozdev.org/">smartTemplate4
development</a>. It seems Outlook is worse when it comes to "<i>breaking</i>"
our legacy tags (such as <blockquote>)... it's biggest problem
is that it doesn't have the <i>bendiness </i>of our Add-On model
(plus a <i>userContent.css</i>).<br>
<br>
<blockquote class=" cite" id="mid_50077767_3050402_gmail_com"
cite="mid:50077767.3050402@gmail.com" type="cite"> <br>
Also, according to that, it seems the Outlook 2013 preview doesn't
improve on Outlook 2010 or Outlook 2007. So your claims of
"Outlook is working on this" are just not true.<br>
</blockquote>
well, not my claim, actually. Just a quote from M$ :)<br>
<br>
<blockquote class=" cite" id="mid_50077767_3050402_gmail_com"
cite="mid:50077767.3050402@gmail.com" type="cite"> Desktop clients
have it easy: we can just take our favorite rendering engine and
bolt some content security controls onto it, which means advanced
CSS/HTML support is very cheap. Webmail clients can't leverage
that fact, because the needs of the legacy web are such that the
content security policy they get is way too loose. Sandboxed
iframes might be able to solve the problem, but I don't think
they're powerful enough to disable access to external resources,
which makes it a bit weak. Even if they are, it's not a
sufficiently widely supported to be usable yet, which means it's a
solution that's a few years away at best.<br>
</blockquote>
I think webmail clients just need more intelligent parsers, if they
chose to format emails. GMail goes the other way, by going "rich
text", which is an understandable shortcut. However, this wouldn't
really change my opinions on improving Thunderbird's HTML editor,
as this topic is more in the plain-text / multipart message area.<br>
<blockquote class=" cite" id="mid_50077767_3050402_gmail_com"
cite="mid:50077767.3050402@gmail.com" type="cite"> <br>
True HTML/CSS support is not a simple task; we're spoiled in that
we get this for free, but a large number of email clients don't.<br>
</blockquote>
Yep. spoiled (for rendering) and cursed (for having to edit it) :)<br>
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