Re: Ident patch

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Wed,  3 October 16:16 M . Thielker wrote:

>I would use a character that cannot be typed. CTRL-C or CTRL-A or something - 
>it could be used twice, to frame the signature, that would cover it being at 
>the top of the message, too.

I really don't like the idea of metadata embedded into the text.  Perhaps
a better approach is to highlight the text balsa *thinks* is the signature
and have a button to confirm the change after changing the identity.  If
balsa gets it wrong, the user could change the highlight and then press the
"change signature" button.  Its probably better to have a heuristic that
uses the current signature to guess the location of the new one.  E.g. search
for a string matching the sig but where runs of whitespace are collapsed
to a single space and perhaps ignoring case or punctuation.

>I do not like the idea of yet another pane, and I also don't think MIME is a 
>good idea here - I do have MUAs here that don't do MIME and making that

MIME has only been around with PROPOSED STANDARD status since June 1992.
Obviously the author of the UA in question hasn't had time to update the
code yet!  Still only 9 years have passed, give the guy time.

>another MIME part would make every message, even a plain text one, into a 
>multipart message, hard to read in ascii on a text only terminal with a 
>mailer incapable of rendering it...

I think you mean a multipart MIME message.  A single part message is MIME
if it contains a MIME-Version: header and a Content-Type: header.

Of course another approach is to "attach" a V-Card like Nutscrape can do.

Brian Stafford