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

[Matthew Guenther <mguenthe engr uvic ca>]

On Fri, 24 Mar 2000, Michael Gerdts wrote:
> 
> Perhaps it would be a good idea to use an existing HTML widget to display
> everything.  It seems as though eventually an HTML-capable widget will be
> necessary and there are already such widgets available in projects like the
> GNOME Help Browser and Mozilla.  I'm not familiar with the specifics of
> their use, but it seems as though slapping <pre> </pre> tags around a
> text/plain (along with replacing special characters with &whatever;) would
> work easily.  text/enriched could be handled similarly by converting to
> html.  HTML could be displayed directly...
> 

The only html widget I know of is gtkhtml, and it's supposedly going to be
stable in august.  I think it will be worth the wait.

> OR perhaps the better approach is to use bonobo to bring in the
> type-specific displayer.  Presumably this would make it easy to deal with
> alternative message display techniques.  For example, I imagine that some
> people would like to have audio controls embedded into the message when
> they get an audio/basic attachment, particularly if that is their primary
> way of communicating with a particular person.  Other people may want to
> forgo the overhead of starting up the audio app, since when they get
> audio/basic files they either delete or save them without listening.
> 

Ack!  This has the potential to be a major security risk!  I'm already wary
of displaying HTML automatically with it's potential for abuse by spammers
and more malicious attackers ... to allow the sender of a message to cause
the automatic execution of a file would present a host of problems.  A cool
idea for sure, but very dangerous and tricky to do correctly.  

MBG

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