Re: HTML document "attachment" icon

[Toralf Lund <toralf kscanners com>]

> 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
I agree, more or less. I still think the patch *I* submitted was
acceptible, though (well, obviously I do, or I wouldn't have posted it in
the first place.) Its approach is far from correct or complete, but it is
at least more correct than the original one. I don't think we can expect
all updates to fully implement the correct algorithm without any shortcuts,
but perhaps that was not what you meant.

> 
> 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.
Seems complicated to me, but I don't know libmutt, either.

Perhaps we could leave it at searching for "Content-Disposition:
attachment" for the paperclip icon. If we want an indication about the
content, why not simply want to add an icon if there is *nothing* in the
message that can be viewed directly - based on MIME types? (This would be
separate functionality from the "attachment" logic, so parsing content-type
should be OK.)

Question to those who know the code better than me:

Would it be possible to make the disposition available when the message
headers are loaded?
--
- Toralf