[Petal] Petal::Mail 0.2 released

[William McKee]

On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 01:04:28PM +0000, Jean-Michel Hiver wrote:
> You've given yourself away - now I'm looking forward to this GUI thing
> :) Maybe you could make an application which generates Petal email
> templates using Petal itself or something :)

That would be cool. I'll see what I can whip up. Seeing as I need to
create several emails myself today this may be a useful tool <g>.


> > I have been happily using the Mail::Sendmail module for years but
> > recently ran into some header issues which could only be resolved by
> > patching the source since this module takes care of setting/removing
> > several headers[1]. It'd have been much easier with Petal::Mail.
> 
> Yes I think this is a mistake with most mail modules, they want to hide
> all this really useful header stuff. Of course Petal::Mail assumes you
> know a bit about email headers... depends what you're after really.

Perhaps the GUI could have a beginner and expert mode to create the
templates. Ahh, so many ideas!


> I suppose one could make a basic_sendmail.pl script which could be used
> as a drop-in replacement for sendmail... Since I have stricly *no use*
> for it I'm not going to do it, but of course contributions are welcome
> and if you want to write it I'll stick it in there :)

I'll keep it in mind though agree that it's not topping my list of
needed enhancements.


> > Hopefully, that will fix the annoying conversion of &nbsp; characters to
> > the funky A which I reported a couple weeks ago.
> 
> Unfortunately I haven't had a look at that. Some more precisions on
> what's going wrong would be great.

Did you run the test script and template that I attached to the original
post? Do you get the same results? I could do some more digging if you
don't see a clear reason for this conversion to be taking place.


> If it's a problem *JUST* with Petal::Parser::HTB, I'm thinking of
> writing a subclass to Petal called Petal::Tidy which would send HTML
> files through HTML tidy (to make them XHTML) before passing them on to
> Petal - with its new backend.

Interesting idea but beware of anomalies. For one thing, I had to remove
the CDATA sections that Tidy was sticking into my style and javascript
sections.


> I am not very keen on maintaining deprecated modules & standards, so I
> think this kind of 'smooth upgrade' approach might be worthwhile.
> 
> What do you think?

I think that calling HTML 4 deprecated is a bit premature. Granted it's
not clean and upgrading to XHTML is worth the effort. I'm willing to
test the Petal::Tidy module on the several applications that I have
which use HTML 4 templates.


> PS: Have you noticed? The new Petal leaves comment untouched. This
> should ease your javascript itches :)

Now that you mention it I have been surprised that my embedded
JavaScript is working. That is one of those fixes which easily goes
unnoticed as the module works as anticipated. I love it!

William

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