Re: Another balsa bug... (was Re: crashes)

[Matthew Guenther <mguenthe engr uvic ca>]

On Thu, 23 Mar 2000, Jules Bean wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 23, 2000 at 06:58:04AM -0800, Matthew Guenther wrote:
> > On Thu, 23 Mar 2000, Jules Bean wrote:
> > > 
> > > Hmm.
> > > 
> > > Can I throw in 2 cents here?
> > > 
> > > I'd like to see the inline display method as an option, especially for
> > > text and image types of attachments.  To be honest, when I saw balsa
> > > inlining an image that someone had sent me, I though it was
> > > brilliant...  much better than an attachments widget! Maybe I'm alone
> > > in this view though..
> > > 
> > 
> > I think it's pretty cool myself, and had an identical reaction when I
> > first saw it, however with time I've realized two things:
> > 
> > i) I don't get sent pictures that often :) ii)  It causes a lot of other
> > problems
> > 
> > So although it's cool, until there's a good way of implementing it
> > without breaking more critical features like displaying the text of a
> > message, I would vote to remove it.
> 
> Hmm.
> 
> The thing is, attachments are a misnomer.  Really, we're just talking
> about multi-part MIME.  multi-part MIME is used for a variety of different
> purposes --- for example, some MUAs use it for forwards, resulting in a
> multi-part MIME doc where all the parts are text/plain.  The current
> implementation handles that elegantly.
> 

Using a GtkText widget, couldn't you simply display any parts that are
text/plain in the widget, but everything else goes to the attachment pane?

> Presumably, a charset aware MUA might use multiple text parts when the
> different parts have different charsets.  That also would look better
> inlined.
>

Agreed.

> Unfortunately, I don't understand the current canvas code well enough (or
> at all!) to suggest how hard it is to fix the current font-related
> problem, but my guess is it can't be too hard..
> 

Neither do I, the only serious look I've had is when I was attempting to
figure out how to add GPG support, and I came to the conclusion to go work
on something easier to understand. :)  I'm not against the Canvas per-se,
merely against a bad implementation.  If someone could make it work I would
jump for joy, but right now I don't know how fixable the Canvas is.  

The other thing is I've heard a number of people's major complaint about
Balsa is the inability to select text from a message while viewing it.  The
easiest solution we have is to save the text, open it in another window, and
select from there.  This is, I believe, unsolvable with the canvas.  For me
this isn't a big deal, but it might be for others. 

_THE_ best way, IMHO, would be to get an HTML widget, where we could easily
display text and images inline without any difficulty.  However from looking
around it seems like gtkhtml is not very usable, and I don't know how
reasonable it would be to expect people to have it on their machines.

Blech.   

MBG

-- 
Matthew Guenther                       If you're passed on the right...
mguenthe@engr.uvic.ca                      you're in the wrong lane.