Re: HTML document "attachment" icon

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Fri,  7 September 01:27 hitched97@myrealbox.com wrote:

>At 09:13 AM 9/6/01, Brian Stafford wrote:
>>If a message has a text/html part marked as an attachment, then that's
>>what it is.
>
>I'm not dealing with messages that have parts, just messages that are
>"text/html".  NOT messages that are "multipart/blah" with one of the
>part containing html.  That goes back to the problems Toralf had with
>information not being available when building the message list.

Well, since MIME is a hierarchy, a message with just one part is still
a message with parts.  Since MIME is part of the system, we might as well
use it correctly than incorrectly.

>Only the message header's (not message parts) content-type item is taken
>into account when deciding on an attachment icon for the message list.
>If content-type is text/plain, no icon.  Else, paper clip icon.

I don't think this is correct.

>I have merely attempted to add "text/html, document icon" this.
>If everyone but me hates this, then can we at least change it so
>that "text/html" displays no icon, instead of the paper clip, as
>it does now?

My problem is not the principle, it is that features are being added on an
ad-hoc basis when the correct approach to the problem can be determined from
looking at how MIME works.  The MIME type simply does not infer whether
something is inline or attached content.  Implementing a scheme for inferring
content disposition from MIME type is just plain wrong.  Making it suffer from
feature creep is worse.


However, perhaps the following is a reasonable approach.  If a message
comprising of single part is marked as an attachment then you have a message
consisting only of an attachment.  Show the icon.  If not, then if the UA
cannot display the MIME type show the attachment icon.  Otherwise, no icon.

This much should be easy.  It has the advantage that the icon is displayed
only if something must be saved for use by an external viewer.

For multipart structures, search the hierarchy.  If there are any parts
marked as attachment, show the icon.  If there are no attachments and an
inline part cannot be displayed, show the icon.  In multipart/alternative
show the icon if there are higher quality versions of the document than
the ones that can be displayed by the UA.

This is probably more difficult - I'm not that familiar with libmutt's MIME
handling.

Of course, all this should be done while referring to RFC 2046 - 2049 and
a few others.

Brian.