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The inevitable question is raised by a reader

Sun 4 Jan 2009, 08:48 PM



by Ben Langhinrichs
When I posted my Top 10 rendering goals, you might have noticed that I showed an image of how the message looked in Notes, and another with how it looked in Outlook after being converted to MIME by Domino 8, but I didn't show how it looked with CoexLinks 3.0 (pre-beta) right now.  I have to admit, that is because there were a few outstanding issues and I didn't want to show it off just yet.  After a long weekend of nailing down some niggling bugs, here are the images again, with the first  being the Outlook version after conversion by CoexLinks 3.0 (pre-beta), and then the original Notes version for comparison.  Below that, I have discussed how well we met the ten goals in this particular sample.  (For the sharp-eyed, I changed the subject between when I first sent the message in Notes and when I later sent it with CoexLinks, as I was trying to keep track)


Outlook version after being converted by CoexLinks 3.0 (pre-beta) and then sent via Domino

CoexLinks email version in Outlook


Original Notes e-mail which was sent to external client (for comparison)

Notes email version sent


Progress on the top 10 goals, as shown by this sample

  1. Thin borders which may be on or off as they are in Notes   Works well
  2. Colored table borders   Works well
  3. Fonts sized in point sizes rather than in the HTML sizes   Works well
  4. Font face accuracy for default fonts   Works well
  5. Exact margins/indentation   Not perfect, but pretty close
  6. Accurate table cell widths   Works well
  7. Text highlighters   Works well, although the color is slightly different since Notes uses a hashed color and I use a solid color
  8. Proper list handling   Not shown in any depth, but generally works well
  9. Row and cell padding in tables   Works well
  10. Extended paragraph such as borders and coloring   Not shown in this sample

What do you think?

Copyright © 2009 Genii Software Ltd.

What has been said:


748.1. Erik Brooks (01/05/2009 04:40 AM)

Looking good, Ben. I noticed the "1. 2. 3." in the lower-left list is using a different font when processed.

If IBM had spruced up Domino's standard web HTML rendering anytime since, oh, R5, Domino would have been about 500% more RAD than it already was. What's the feasibility of this being incorporated in some way into generic HTML rendering of forms/pages? Imagining a world where a table looks identical in Notes and on the Web brings tears to my eyes. And xPages *still* doesn't bring that to reality. :-(


748.2. Ben Langhinrichs (01/05/2009 04:53 AM)

Erik - This is already available for web editing with our other product, CoexEdit, although some of the work I have done on CoexLinks will wind up being in the next release of CoexEdit. As for a general form/page renderer, I have played with this some and it doesn't seem terribly difficult for the rendering itself, but there are probably nuances of thinks like button clicks that I would have to be very careful to maintain. Perhaps after CoexLinks 3.0 is out, I'll play more with a plug in that would just render a form or page on its way to the web and see what the difficulty would be to do it right. Thanks!


748.3. Jan Schulz (05.01.2009 09:37)

Now we only need a better RT/HTML to plain text converter... the default domino one is horrible :-(

Just send a default reply as "plain text": the header of the quoted message is horrible enough :-(