[Mailman-Developers] Feature Request - Interactive HTML Digests

[Mark Sapiro]

Tanstaafl wrote:

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


What does encapsulation mean to you?

Consider a digest containing what was originally an HTML message. Even
that is difficult. You can't just insert that message's HTML body into
the digest. What if that HTML were such that parts of it were rendered
at the 'top' ahead of even the table of contents. Unless the process
creating the digest has a complete HTML rendering engine (compatible
with the one in your MUA), it can't know how the entire digest will
render if it just inserts arbitrary HTML from a message into the
middle of a digest.

Thus, you are reduced to something like HTMLizing the current plain
text digest with links to all it's scrubbed attachments and HTML
parts. This would be acceptable for lists that accept plain text only,
but I'm not sure it would work well for other lists.


>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?


As I have mentioned in other posts in this thread, the 'reply*' buttons
are doable with mailto: links provided you don't want any special
features like quoting selected text. The mailto: could include a body=
fragment that was a quoting of the entire (plain text) message being
replied to, but if you want to quote selected text, you'd have to
select the text and then use the MUA's 'reply-list' button to generate
the reply, but then you don't have the proper subject or the
in-reply-to and references for threading. Anything else requires
javascript behind the button.



>>> 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...


Defaulting to keep the List-Post header in the MIME digest messages is
easy enough. I can do that if no one comes up with a good reason why
not. Barry mentioned List-Post for other lists/umbrellas, but
CookHeaders already removes those.

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