[Mailman-Developers] Feature Request - Interactive HTML Digests

[Tanstaafl]

On 2010-02-23 9:27 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Tanstaafl writes:
> 
>> Also, maybe peeking at the message source for one of the Yahoo and
>> Google Digests could make this easier...

> All 250KB of Javascript?<wink/>
>
> There is *serious* magic in there; this is *wa-a-ay* beyond the remit
> of Mailman.  Mailman is *not* a full-featured MUA, and it never will
> be.
>
> Also, I somehow suspect that the libraries that implement all the
> interesting stuff are *not* free software.

Ok, granted (I closed the source window pretty quickly... it was giving
me a headache)... ;)

The point I'm getting at is, I'd like to see the basic framework for a
new HTML digest added to MM. Barry said he is fine with it as long as it
is done right, and Mark seems to concur. Well, you have to start
somewhere, so why not just start with the really simple/basic #anchor
tags being the first 'feature', and just see what happens. Mark seems to
believe that adding the Reply-To-List/Sender' mailto: links that can
also grab the in-reply-to references will be doable (no idea how hard
though), so maybe those could be version 1.1 of the new digest... and
maybe those are the only features that will ever be added - or maybe
some python/html guru will see the potential and step up and figure out
how to make some of the more magical features happen for HTML based
lists too...

>> 2. Make it template based, so as to be easily modifiable by the MM
>> admin.

> Impossible.

Ahem... 'Nothing is impossible' my Dad would say. ;)

But, sorry, I misspoke... I didn't really mean the average MM admin... I
meant a developer with adequate knowledge of the tools/code.

> The hard work is not in outputting the page, it's in parsing the
> incoming messages and deciding how to insert them into

That would be the MM 'function' I mentioned...

> the relatively inflexible HTML container.

And this would be the HTML 'template' I mentioned...

But this begs the question...

How does MM generate the two digests it supports now? Does it store the
individual messages in some temporary location until it is time to
generate the digest, then do whatever it does to generate it? Or does it
process each message as it comes in, and cumulatively add them until the
trigger for sending the digest is pulled?

The reason I ask this is, a way would have to be found to provide anyone
who chose to work on this a 'test bed' of messages to be used to
generate the digests to test any of their modifications, otherwise
testing modifications would be a royal pain...

> The MM admin can probably make it prettier, but I doubt that it will
> be possible to do this in such a way that they can change the basic
> functionality.

No offense, but I don't see that at all... MM is open source, and every
single function of it can be modified to change the basic functioality -
all that is necessary is someone competent with the appropriate tools -
in this case, python (, C?) and HTML - and the code.

-- 

Charles