[Mailman-Developers] Feature Request - Interactive HTML Digests

[Mark Sapiro]

Tanstaafl wrote:
>
>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?


As posts are delivered from a digestable list, they are accumulated in
a standard *nix format mailbox (lists/LISTNAME/digest.mbox). The two
digest formats are produced from this mbox, and it is emptied for the
next one.


>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.


Who is interested enough and motivated enough to do the work in a way
that would not turn into an endless bug-fixing time sink.

The examples you quote, digests from YahooGroups and GoogleGroups,
basically convert all digested messages to plain text before digesting
them. All fonts, colors and other HTML features are just removed as
are any attachments (which just disappear without any indication that
they were even there). The Yahoo digest does keep links from the
original HTML, but the Google digest doesn't even do that.

Even this "least common denominator" form of digest still requires that
the digest preparation process have access to an HTML rendering engine
of some kind to do the plain text conversion.

Also see Stephen's reply at
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2010-February/021005.html>
which I read after composing most of the above (I was waiting for a
digest from Yahoo to confirm attachments were stripped).

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