[Mailman-Developers] Feature Request - Interactive HTML Digests

[Mark Sapiro]

Mark Sapiro wrote:

>Tanstaafl wrote:
>>
>>Here's what I'm imagining:
>>
>[...]
>>
>>3. When replying to a message, preserve the message subject *and* all of
>>   the individual message references so that replying to messages from
>>   the HTML digests doesn't break threading - basically so it looks as
>>   if it was replied to individually and separately, not from the list
>>   digest.
>
>
>Current Mailman MIME format digests do this if the user's MUA supports
>it.
>
>
>>Apparently Yahoo's doesn't preserve the message header/references (bad),
>>but it does preserve the subject.


There's an inherent difficulty in what you propose. I suspect it is the
reason why quoting doesn't work with TBird and Yahoo digests.

Your points 1 and 2 imply that the digest must be a single HTML part.
Thus, a reply of some sort button is really a mailto: link which in
Yahoo's case, probably has a query fragment with "Subject=..." and
could additionally have query fragments for "In-Reply-To=..." and
"References=...". This mechanism could also support "fixed" quoting of
the entire message with a "body=..." fragment, but quoting selected
text would require some kind of scripting.

My point is that MUAs aren't web browsers, and all this would depend
heavily on on features that are not supported uniformly if at all in
MUAs.

My personal feeling is that if things can be done in a way that works
reasonably in MUAs that don't support the features, then it might be
feasable, but if something works with one MUA and is a disaster in
another, it is better not done.

Certainly, this kind of HTML digest would have to be optional.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan