[Mailman-Developers] Feature Request - Interactive HTML Digests

[Tanstaafl]

On 2010-02-22 9:13 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> 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.

Ok... but again (how many times have I said this now??), the current
MIME and plain text digest versions will continue to work as they
currently do. Someone would have to explicitly choose this new digest,
and only someone who had a compatible mail client would/should be doing
so - and would find out quickly enough that their mail client isn't
compatible if that was the case.

So, you can still navigate your digests the way you always have. What
this feature request would do is enable those of us who use non EMACS
based GUI mail clients to have an effective way to interact with digest
messages too.

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

Ok, I can see that attachments is one thing I hadn't considered... I
don't know how those could be handled...

Mark had said that this request would require that the digest be one big
inline HTML message - but maybe this could be handled by the
'encapsulation' process. Again, I'm asking questions, and please
remember these questions are coming from a non-programmer, so if they
are self-evidently stupid from a programmers point of view - well,
that's why.

> The thing is that the users I'm used to don't want to change 
> interfaces ...

<sigh> See above comment re: navigation...

>> 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.

Yes, but the headers don't have are a separate MIME part that don't have
any HTML formatting, right? So, any back-end code that worked its magic
on the headers (which is where all of the information is that would
allow Replies to not break threading is contained) would work on HTML
messages too, right? Or, if not, what am I missing?

> "Simple" HTML simply doesn't lend itself to "encapsulating"
> structured documents, except with devices like frames.

All I mean by 'simple' is simple enough that most mail clients capable
of rendering HTML email won't have a problem with it, and the fact is,
most can render fairly complex HTML.

>>> 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.

Agreed...

-- 

Charles