[Moin-user] Changing default behavior on downloads.

[Thomas Waldmann]

Rick,

I completely understand the point that you are making.

But we should try to solve that in another way (suggestions welcome).

Problem is:

Even if we introduce some way to configure the default "do=" value (that
would be possible, of course) for now, that would just delay the problem
to a later moin release (2.0 or so).

That is because attachments will be items on their own then (like pages
will be also items of just some specific mimetype).
AttachFile action will go away and will just be replaced by normal item
rendering.
Links to files will be just links to items (same as links to pages) and
we will either provide a markup converter converting attachment:foo
to /foo or emulation code for "attachment:".

At the place where the link is rendered there will be no cheap way to
know the target item mimetype (one would have to open target item
metadata for all links to know the mimetype, that would be slow), thus
link generation must be the same for page and file items.

If you link to a page item, it is using "show" action [default],
therefore it has to be the same for files (note that the concrete url
param "action=show" or "do=view" (or just nothing because it is default)
does not matter, the behaviour is the point).

Also, even if we would find out the mimetype of the link target, what
shall we do with it? What should be done depends on the capability of
the user agent and on the intent of the user, e.g.:

If it is a jpeg image - does the use want to download that foto or just
look at it?

If it is a pdf, does the user want to download it or render it within
the browser - does he have a browser plugin?

If it is some unified diff, just look at it or download it?

Because of these undecidable issues (as far as moin is concerned, the
user usually knows what he/she wants), I am rather thinking that we
should not try to do magic depending on the target item mimetype, but
just link to the "show" rendering (that rendering will also offer some
option to download it).

Well, and this is exactly what recent moin releases do.

What I would like to have is a much more pretty "show rendering" than
the rather ugly thing we have now. So help with layout and CSS is also
welcome (CSS hates me :).

Not sure though if the best time to improve this is now - maybe rather
AFTER we merge the storage refactoring into main repo in a few months.

The "show" rendering could also show some metadata of the item and maybe
its recent history. For images, it could be some scaled rendering.

Cheers,

Thomas