[Mailman-Developers] Feature Request - Interactive HTML Digests

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Tanstaafl writes:

 > > That's not the point.  The point is that in my experience these are 
 > > minimum requirements for a digest view,
 > 
 > Sorry, maybe I'm dense but I don't know what you mean by 'these' when
 > you said 'these are minimum requirements'... and reading the previous
 > messages wasn't helpful either...

Navigation, navigation, and navigation.

 > > and I don't see how you plan to implement that in portable HTML
 > > unless you make *really* draconian restrictions on what formats
 > > people are allowed to post in.
 > 
 > I'm guessing that comment is intended more for the 'Reply' features.
 > Apparently some of the features I'm asking for should be [relatively]
 > easily doable (and Barry confirmed this) - like capturing the subject,
 > and adding the anchors for scrolling down to a message from the message
 > summary at the top, then back to the top.

Those parts are basically trivial, yes.  The problem is messages that
are originally HTML mail, and perhaps attachments.

The thing is that the users I'm used to don't want to change
interfaces from mail reader toolbar to HTML links embedded in the
message, and they wouldn't be happy with jumping back and forth
between the summary/TOC and the messages; they want to see the TOC and
the current message at the same time.

 > Being that I'm not a programmer, maybe I just don't know enough about
 > what can and can't be done, but my thinking was that the headers of each
 > message could somehow be 'encapsulated' and hidden (ie, not 'rendered')
 > in the generated 'Interactive HTML Digest' in such a way that would
 > allow the more complex 'special features' in this request to work.

Headers are not a problem; Mailman already does filter out many
"uninteresting" headers in the plain text digest.  The problem is if
the message itself is structured, such as in HTML, or containing
attachments.  "Simple" HTML simply doesn't lend itself to
"encapsulating" structured documents, except with devices like
frames.

 > > It looks like somebody has borrowed Guido's time machine and the
 > > feature (ie, List-Post in each message in digest) is already
 > > implemented.  But it's not default yet, so you could ask for that. ;-)

 > Hmmmm... is there an option somewhere to enable it? I don't see anything
 > in the Digest Options for any of the lists I manage...

No.  Mark explained how to get that, you need to access the command
line interface and change the list config to add the List-Post header
to the "keep" list.  I think that rather than have an option it might
as well be the default to keep it.