On 2 May 2019, at 17:13, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
On 2 May 2019, at 5:07, Benny Kjær Nielsen wrote:
The exception would be if the sender uses tabs in plain text to align
something *not* at the beginning of a line. In this case, it would
make sense to enforce a particular tab size by converting it into
spaces. Then it might also make sense to generate HTML which enforces
the use of a fixed-width font when the message is displayed.
This isn't scenario that makes much sense unless both the sender and
the recipient are using
fixed-width fonts, I suspect. And trying to figure out the semantics
for conversion to a <TABLE>
are difficult. Suppose, for example, that the user types two tabs in a
row. Is that an empty entry,
or is it visually aligning things? And how would you decide where the
table entries start? Seeing
where the left edge of the bounding box for the first character after
a tab is? Suppose that the
table is actually numeric entries, where I tab to the table cell, but
then space so that the numbers
are right-justified. Do you want to interpret that, too?
My conclusion is that it would be a nice feature to have but not
nearly worth your pain, as long
as there's some way to include an HTML table. (I don't know Markdown
nearly well enough to
guess—I've never really learned it; I find it just as easy to type
actual HTML…) I suspect that
converting to spaces is the easy, sane way, perhaps with some
auto-select to a fixed-width font.
I have been unable to figure out any way to include an HTML table. But,
I am not sure how fancy such a feature would need to be. Simply sending
as HTML with a fixed-width font and converting the tabs to spaces would
cover the vast majority of cases, I suspect.
--Randall
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