[Mailman-Developers] Feature Request - Interactive HTML Digests

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Tanstaafl writes:
 > On 2/20/2010 10:53 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

 > > My users expect to be able to view the messages in a digest as an 
 > > email folder. That's the most important digest feature for them;
 > 
 > I wouldn't have had a clue what you're talking about here, but maybe
 > you're talking about the Vi-in-Emacs feature Barry mentioned?

VM.  Yes.  Also Gnus does this the same way.  I believe pretty much
all of the major Emacs MUAs do it this way.

Online manual (older version): http://www.wonderworks.com/vm/user-manual/
Current development: http://www.nongnu.org/viewmail/

 > > they do not want to have to page through messages they don't care
 > > about to get to the ones they do care about,
 > 
 > Nor do I, but I don't use Vi-in-Emacs, so my feature request is to allow
 > a way for people who don't use it to be able to use digests but not have
 > to page through messages they don't care about to get to the ones they
 > do, and easily interact with them without breaking threading for
 > everyone else.

How do you propose to get that effect though?  HTML is not designed to
make it easy!

 > I'd really like to know what you meant by 'view the messages in a
 > digest in an email folder'... :)

Here's my MUA reading a digest in my main mail folder INBOX:

http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/outgoing/INBOX.png

and here's my MUA reading the messages in the digest:

http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/outgoing/AUCTeX.png

If the players didn't have numbers on their jerseys, I bet it would
take you a minute to figure out Who's on First.

 > See above. No one would force anyone to choose this new digest
 > version.

That's not the point.  The point is that in my experience these are
minimum requirements for a digest view, 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 think you should post a bug report (weirdly enough) to the Mailman
 > > project on Launchpad.net.
 > 
 > Thanks, I'll do one of those tomorrow (gotta run now)...

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. ;-)