Creating HTML emails with mutt

[Derek Martin]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 11:43:07AM +0000, John Long wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Oct 2019 23:47:38 +1300
> martin f krafft <madduck at madduck.net> wrote:
> 
> > Regarding the following, written by "John Long" on 2019-10-31 at
> > 10:30 Uhr +0000:
> > >1. Commonly done != standard. There are standards for things like
> > >MIME, POP3, IMAP etc. I'm not aware of ANSI, ISO, IETF standards
> > >that say that HTML email is a thing.  
> > 
> > Quoting the HTML RFC from 1995: "The Hypertext Markup Language 
> > (HTML) is a simple markup language used to create hypertext 
> > documents that are platform independent. HTML documents are SGML 
> > documents with generic semantics that are appropriate for 
> > representing information from a wide range of domains. HTML markup 
> > can represent hypertext news, **mail**, documentation, and 
> > hypermedia; …"
> 
> That's the tail wagging the dog. I'm saying I haven't seen an *email*
> RFC that says "HTML may/should be used for email."

The MIME standard (RFC-1341, 1992) is what you're looking for:  Multipurpose
Internet *Mail* Extensions.  It defines (quoting the RFC):

            2.  A Content-Type header field, generalized from  RFC  1049
                 [RFC-1049],  which  can be used to specify the type and
                 subtype of data in the body of a message and  to  fully
                 specify  the  native  representation (encoding) of such
                 data.

This allows for "data in the body of a message" to be in arbitrary
formats, which includes literally anything (including experimental or
user-defined X-* types), which most certainly includes HTML.

And FWIW, I *was* discussing (very limited, completely text-based)
support for HTML messages in Mutt.  I want it, have wanted it for a
long time, because all of the available options for dealing with it
have serious drawbacks at least some of the time.  This thread seems
to have revealed that I'm far from alone in thinking so.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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