[development] HTML emails

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 9:59:01 -0500
Larry Garfield <larry at garfieldtech.com> wrote:

> That said, there may well be advantages to switching to
> drupal_render() for email messages.  I am in general a big fan of
> structured data remaining structured for as long as possible.  The

I really really would like to avoid HTML emails and I agree with
most of your points and they are enough to hate html emails.
Anyway it is a very frequently requested feature.
I know consistency of rendering of HTML is a hell... but it is still
a very frequent request we have to live with.

We have a rendering engine that is specialised to render HTML.
Even if mobile devices are getting more and more popular, they are
getting more and more able to render html as it is.
Template system makes much easier to delegate design tasks to non
programmers compared to XLS/XML/whatever and building up a more
flexible rendering engine may take a long time... why not just
provide a way to build up structured emails (attachment, auto
inclusion of CSS etc...) and something that just do html2text?

BTW I didn't find html2text up to the task. w3m provided the best
results in the tools I've used... but there is no w3m library that I
know that can be easily integrated in php. Rewriting a text browser
in php doesn't look to be easy.

-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it