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Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Thu 10 Jan 2019, 03:38 PM
Continuing on from yesterday's post, I should emphasize that the best rendering in the world only works if the target supports the CSS and HTML that make up the page. When we are talking about email that goes outside of your Notes network, even to others within your company who may be reading on Gmail or Outlook 365 or a mobile device, not everything is supported that you might find in a web page on a modern browser. Therefore, when CoexLinks Fidelity renders an email to MIME to leave Notes, it has to build in logic to allow it to degrade gracefully and minimally.

All of the following except the first are rendered to MIME by CoexLinks Fidelity, and then sent out through the normal Domino channels. There are many other email clients or devices, but this should give a sense of what kind of degradations might be expected and how they are handled. As an example, in Office 365, the background of the table rows that are gradients is set to whichever of the gradient colors best contrasts with the text within. The PC Gmail and two mobile examples are all from the same email displayed in various ways.

When we can't make it perfect, we make it as good as possible. In all our products.



Notes client (rich text)
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Gmail on Firefox on PC
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Office 365
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Gmail app on Samsung J23 phone
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Email app on Samsung J23 phone
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In comparison, the ordinary Notes 10 MIME rendering is uniformly degraded across all mail 
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Tue 8 Jan 2019, 10:13 PM
I'm glad to see the Domino Jams taking place, but since not everybody will even move to IBM Notes/Domino 10 in the near future, note that this demo would look the same if run in Notes/Domino 7 or 8 or 8.5 or 9 or 10. And yes, you can rest assured it will work in HCL Notes/Domino 11 when that comes around.

The fact of the matter is, if everybody would stick to simple text in Notes, there would be no need for Genii Software's products. In fact, if everybody carefully built their rich text content with web rendering in mind, there would be less need for Genii Software's products. But there would also be little need for Notes. 

The fact is, people out there use all sorts of rich text constructs, thinking that whatever they create will keep looking the way it should. This sample was built around an actual customer issue from December, though I adapted it for demo purposes to be both generic and easy to visualize. The customer used the gradient colors for the title rows and had no borders except a table border. Easy enough to imitate, but not so easy for the Domino web engine to render. I am building demos showing this and other documents based on actual customer issues rendered for use in email, mobile apps, JSON, web apps, XPages apps. The results vary some, but in all cases, the Genii products come very close to rendering the customer's data the way it was built. (Note: this was not from rich text a person created by hand, but a rendered form, which is often the source of complex content.)

Can you spot the differences? If so, do you think your employees, partners, and customers might as well?



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Copyright © 2019 Genii Software Ltd.

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