html restrictions in ics file - html

I'm developing a function (C#, ASP.NET 4) which creates and downloads a .ics file.
I'm trying to figure out what restrictions there are on the html within the X-ALT-DESC property. For example, if I send this:
X-ALT-DESC;FMTTYPE=text/html:<html><body><ul><li style="font-weight:bold">#1</li><li>#2</li></ul><table border=1><tr><td>table test</td></tr></table><span style="font-weight:bold">Site Visit Agenda</span><br/><span>8:00 AM</span><br/><span>Check in with management<br/>Facility Inspection<br/>Training and Meeting Setup</span></tr></table></body><html>
When I open the downloaded file, it opens in Outlook 2010, so that seems o.k. While the list stuff renders as I'd expect, the table border doesn't show, nor do either of the font-weight settings get rendered. (On the plus side, the html tags aren't rendered as text, it just doesn't format the alt desc like you'd see in a browser with the same HTML).
Of course, we're trying to figure out what HTML we can and cannot use to format the information we want to show up in the alt description.
Searching around, I can't find anything which talks about what's allowed and what isn't.
Thanks to anyone who has a pointer.

Related

HTML Hyperlinks and HTML Structure

I'm a mech engineer w/ no experience in HTML, doing an odd task for my boss.
I have managed to save the excel sheet (contains hyperlinks) to HTML format. However, I'd like to edit these hyperlinks within the HTML code.
I right-clicked on the test.htm document and viewed the HTML in notepad. I expected to be able to find the hyperlink at this stage.
My question is:
What is the structure of HTML files, in the sense that the hyperlink must be stored somewhere, how do I view it, preferably within notepad?
This has to do with the way excel saves to html. It generates a filename.htm which acts as a viewer, and then places data for each sheet inside a "filename_files" folder. Inside, you'll find sheetxxx.htm files (which actually contain the href you are looking for). When you open filename.htm, scripts inside it load the corresponding sheets into the page.
And this is why you won't find what you want inside the main file. Keep in mind that html is dynamic, which means that, differently from opening a static file in notepad, it can be configured to perform actions, changing what you see in the page and its code behind (Dom Explorer)
Hyperlinks in HTML are designated by the "a href" tag. For instance,
This Link Goes To Google
creates a link that says "This Link Goes To Google"

Alternative to base64 Encoded Image sources (E-Mail Signatures)

I am trying to generate email signatures for my entire company so I am using a script to fill in an HTML template with each individual's information and generating an HTML file that I would like to use for the signature. The generation of the HTML works fine and I can load the HTML into chrome and it displays 100% correctly.
I would prefer to not have to host these images somewhere at the moment and would like them to be embedded in the e-mail. We can achieve this by using outlook on each individuals machine to create the signature by hand, but again we want to avoid that. Ideally, we will generate these templates and then automatically put these files on each employee's computer so all we have to do is select the signature from outlook.
The problem we are having is that when we do this, the image does not load. It seems that outlook won't allow base64 encoded images? I've tried to work around this by trying to attach the image to the email and then referencing it, but this doesn't seem to work either. I used this template. I got the boundary from a test email I sent myself, but I don't even know if this is a good way to go about this either.
In short, is there a way to create an .htm file for outlook signatures that includes the image inside the .htm file?
External image file that will be added as an attachment is the only way - Word (which renders HTML messages in Outlook) does not support base64 embedded images.
Try to create a new signature with an image in Outlook and see how they reference the images.

Display/Render RTF doc in browser display using html textarea or something similar

My web application has an feature wherein preformatted RTF documents are used as templates and the user can select the source of data and then merge with the RTF documents templates to create merged RTF files. The RTF templates have placeholders which get replaced with user selected content. The final doc can either be saved or opened directly if word/wordpad is available on the local users machine.
Now, I have a requirement to display the merged document to the user for confirmation. The user may either print or save the document to the system directly. The display should not be word/wordpad application but should be within the application itself, using textarea or something similar to render the document. Can you please let me know if its possible to render the RTF document in textarea or not. Along with the displayed content, there should be options to print and save the document.If I have to convert the RTF to Html and then display the html content in textarea , please let me know how i can do the conversion and then display the html in the page.
That's a very difficult requirement. First of all, let's dismiss the idea about a <textarea>, because it does not support any formatting at all. All the WYSIWYG editors you've seen out there are based on <iframe>s.
Secondly, no browser can directly display a RTF. You can embed it as an <object>, and some might show it (IE probably will), but I can't say which ones won't. Portable devices almost certainly won't. But you should test this though, maybe it works well enough after all.
Failing that, HTML conversion is also out of question, because RTF has very very many features that cannot be emulated in HTML. There are some converters out there (google), but but they will all come with serious limitations. If you want full support, you will have to do your own rendering via Canvas or Flash or something.
To this end I'd suggest checking out Google Docs. They've gone through all of this hassle and have a rather feature-full engine for displaying most possible documents. I think it was also possible to embed them in your own webapges, though I've never checked it out myself.
Use a <PRE> tag to Display/Render RTF doc in browser.

how display html as plain text without modifying the .html

I teach GUI and use web pages rather than PP.
I am starting to add HTML5 and CSS instruction to the course.
for a file style_by_kind.html
CSS example style_by_kind.html
when student clicks on the link, obviously, runs the file and displays.
the students can use "save as" in their browser to get a copy for themselves.
I want to display the source as text so I can lecture about the html CSS code.
The link runs the code.
Physically including the file runs the html code.
does not applicable, output only
does not display, comment
Because of continuous updates, it is undesirable to copy the
file with another file type extension, and impossible to "quote" out the html.
Any easy syntax to put in the link or around a physically included copy,
so the student just sees plain text, would be greatly appreciated.
I would suggest changing the extension of the html file to txt.
So when u browse to the txt file, it will still get displayed in the browser with the exact same coding.
Depending on how the files are served up, you might be able to set a ContentType header as text/plain, but I suspect most browsers will still sniff the MIMETYPE of the file and render it as html.
Using the <pre> tag as #hamlin11 suggests is a good idea.
Use <plaintext></plaintext> tags
For example, "This is a lesson on bold tags: <plaintext><b>Bold Text</b></plaintext> will display as <b>Bold Text</b>"

Parse multimedia files out of an HTML page (any language)

Given an HTML page I would like to get all the 'x' files that are embedded in the HTML file or are linked by it, where 'x' equals:
Images (JPG,PNG,GIF...)
Documents (Word, PowerPoint, PDF...)
Flash (.flv, .swf)
How do I do this?
So images are easy to extract because they are either linked to with a link ending in a (.png|.jpg|....) or they are embedded with an img tag.
Documents can not be embedded, they can only be linked to (with a link ending in a .doc|.ppt|.pdf|...). So they are also easy to get.
Here is my problem:
How do I get the flash files that are embedded in webpages?
Please give me a pseudo-algorithm or a regex pattern.
If I am wrong in my points above (1. and 2.) please tell me so too.
Thanks!
The Firefox extension DownThemAll lets you right-click a page and download all of the media of a specified extension. It's open source, so you might want to look at their code and see how they implemented it.
I'd use an event based XML parser (like SAX) and write the rules for the and tags to get the src and href attributes.