From: Mark Holm 
To: atm{at}shore.net
Reply-To: Mark Holm 


A couple of years ago I wrote a program to convert digest messages into
HTML. My version starts with a .txt version of each digest message.  That
is something
of a drawback because it is one more step to have to save the message as
text. It would be nice if the program would suck the digest right out of
the mailbox file, but then it becomes dependent on the particular format of
a particular e-mail program's files.

There are some advantages to converting to HTML.  These are essentially all
advantages of "pure" hypertext rather than the glorified version
we have all around us today.
        1. The table of contents can be converted into a table of links.  Makes
it much
easier to get to the particular message you want to read.
        2. One can add navigation links between individual messages.  Two of
the most
useful (though a bit challenging to implement) are next-in-thread and
previous-in-thread.  If the programmer is ambitious, (I haven't been this
ambitious yet.) he can make the thread links work between digest messages
as well as within.
        3. URL's can be converted to links.  Not such an advantage today now
that many
e-mail programs do this even with otherwise plain text messages.
        4. The program that does the conversion can build an index page to let
you
quickly get to older messages (again not such an advantage with modern
e-mail programs.)

Disadvantages.
        1. Another step to perform before reading the message.
        2. Duplication of information content of files takes up disc space.
        3. HTML adds to the file length.
        4. (more of an issue for the programmer) Existing HTML has to be
disabled before
conversion. (Can be thought of as an advantage because it will disable some
potentially malicious packages.)


Actually I would like to see the list manager program offer the option of
an HTMLized digest with the features listed above.  It would actually be
easier from a programming point of view to do the conversion as the
messages come in rather than having to parse the elements out of a
concatenated digest.  The thing is, most list manager programs seem to be
written by the sort of programmers who think programming for anything other
than a Turing machine is for sissies.  These types are not interested in
convenience.  Especially not convenience for someone else.

My program is at http://pong.telerama.com/~mdholm/atm/dth/dth.html  The
major problem with my version is that since it was written in Visual Basic,
the files are big.  It is also a little slow, because I used the text
manipulation routines of a rich text editing window rather than writing my
own.

Mark Holm
mdholm{at}telerama.com

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