[Mailman-Developers] Feature Request - Interactive HTML Digests

[Barry Warsaw]

On Feb 17, 2010, at 08:33 AM, Tanstaafl wrote:

>I'm really excited about the developments ongoing with MM3... :)

Great!  If you're at Pycon, come sprint with us.  If you're not here, we're
going to at the very least be active on #mailman for virtual sprinters.

>One thing I'd really like to see in MM3 with respect to list digests is
>what I'll call 'Interactive HTML Digests'. Yahoo 'full featured' digests
>go about halfway to where I'd like to see MM3 go.

I think it would be nice to have a rich HTML-based digest format, and I
believe it should be fairly easy to put such a thing together (read: branches
welcome!).  If you look in mailman/interfaces/member.py you'll see that
there's a DeliverMode enum with a summary_digests flag.  This is really a
placeholder for essentially what you're suggesting.

MM3 has a separate DigestRunner it uses to compose digests when the time is
right.  It does this to move the work of digest creation and sending out of
the main processing runner.  Right now, it's fairly hardcoded to just the two
existing digests (MIME and RFC 1153), but with a little refactoring and
interface definition, it could be easily generalized to include another style
of digest.

The important methods are .add_toc() for adding a table of contents,
.add_message() for adding a single message to the digest, and .finish() for
producing the email ready message tree.  There are two classes implemented
currently MIMEDigester and RFC1153Digester.  I could easily see an
HTMLDigester or some such.

>1. Each message subject in the summary of messages at the top of the
>   digest are embedded hyperlinks that if clicked, will scroll the
>   digest down to that message (Yahoos do this now),

This should be doable with an HTML supporting mail reader.  I think may be an
RFC for this kind of inter-part linking (can't find it right now;
multipart/related or something like that).

>2. Each message displayed in the digest body would have the following
>   in a single line at the very bottom *and* top of each message (Yahoos
>   are only at the bottom):
>
>  a) separate button/links for: 'Reply to Sender', 'Reply to List' and
>     maybe 'Reply to all' (that last one could be optional?), and
>  b) little 'Back to top' links to scroll back to the top of the message
>     summary

Would these require JavaScript?  Hmm, maybe they can be done with mail:to
links.

>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.

I have no idea how you'd do this in a cross MUA way.  That to me is the
biggest risk with something like this.  For those who choose HTML/Summary/Rich
digests, I'd like to see broad MUA support, but I honestly have no idea of the
state of HTML and JavaScript support across mail readers.  You don't have to
worry about text-only, or text-preferred mail readers though because users of
those won't be selecting HTML digests.

-Barry
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