Re: [Evolution-hackers] A better mail formatter

[Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com>]

On Fri, 2012-06-01 at 19:10 +0200, Dan Vratil wrote:
> I have realized that the formatter could be made much more flexible and nicer 
> by making proper object-oriented design. With Milan we have came up with quite 
> a nice design.

That sounds freaking awesome!


> The first big step is to move everything to libemformat. Why have something 
> here and something there.

I vaguely recall EMFormatHTML had some mail-specific dependency that
kept it in the mail library, but maybe that's long since been solved.

It totally makes sense to consolidate if that's indeed possible now.


> The parser and formatter were separated to their own classes EMailParser and 
> EMailFormatter and the _actual_ parsing/formatting is done by extensions. 
> Essentially there is a class for each mime type we support and they are  
> derived from EExtension.

I'm literally crossing an item off my own To-Do list now.  Nice!


> As part of the work, I converted some plugins, namely audio-inline, itip-
> formatter, prefer-plain, tnef-attachment and vcard-inline, to modules. There 
> is no API yet to extend the preferences dialog though, so for this some of 
> them still install a little EPlugin-based library with the GUI.

That would be itip-formatter and prefer-plain, right?

Nowadays I'm not sure the Preferences dialog should even be extensible
at all.  It's too tempting to just tack on options willy-nilly without
giving them sufficient thought.  If something's important enough to show
up in the application preferences then it probably ought to live in the
core application.  That's just my opinion.

I'm inclined to suggest just add those plugin preferences directly.

BTW, my branch and your branch will probably collide in itip-formatter,
but hopefully the conflicts are easy to resolve.


> And why we have done this all? Because of text-highlight module. I've written 
> less technical blog about it, so see for yourself what we already have and 
> what I plan for near future.
> 
> http://www.progdan.cz/2012/06/evolution-gets-a-new-e-mail-formatter/

Neat!  Does the text-highlight have to be chosen each time or is it
remembered somehow?


Matthew Barnes