Actually we were doing it before 1993 (RFC1521 came in that year, which means
it'd been in use for long enough that the problems had been hashed out and it
was ready to be codified). It was how e-mail clients like elm displayed
content of any type that they couldn't handle themselves. HTML would've been
just another content type to be displayed by a helper program (a Web browser in
this case).
The only difference now is that we've pulled the HTML
rendering engine into the e-mail client itself and it's rendering into a child
window of the e-mail client (the reading pane window) instead of into a child
window of the helper program's main window (the browser's content pane). In the
process of course we went through a hybrid approach where eg. the browser
(Internet Explorer) was packaged into a COM interface which could be embedded
into another application (the e-mail client) and draw directly into the
application's windows while remaining external to the application. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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