Re: another day

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Thu, 27 September 14:07 Ali Akcaagac wrote:
>  On 2001.09.27 14:11:33 +0200 Brian Stafford wrote:
>  > On Thu, 27 September 13:05 Ali Akcaagac wrote:
>  > >  another unbehaviour, why does balsa default to
>  > >  html mails when reading unread mails ? i just
>  > >  found it out today after experimenting.
>  >
>  > As far I can see, balsa is behaving correctly.  A multipart/alternative
>  > is ordered from least to most faithful rendering of the alternative 
>versions
>  > of a document.  A UA is expected to select the highest quality veriosn of
>  > the document that it supports.  If a text/html version is after the
>  text/plain
>  > in multipart/alternative, then from the sender's perspective, the text/html
>  > is the higher quality version and balsa is correct to select it.
>  > See RFC 2046.
>   hmmm yeah this may be but i really prefer text beeing shown.
>  well is there a way to keep rfc rules and satisfy users needs ?
>  e.g. a prefs flag telling us 'show text instead html mails' ?
>  i dont want to reactivate procmail to kill html crap out of my
>  mails.

It seems to me that there is no harm in a UA supporting, say, checkboxes
to configure mime types it is prepared to display in a multipart/alternative.
So long as the UA defaults to the highest quality version of the document
from the intersection of the set of alternative mime types and the user 
preference
mime types, it would still be exhibiting conformant behaviour.

I can easily imagine a scenario where the most faithful representation is, for
example, application/postscript.  Even if the UA can display postscript, some
users might prefer to use it only for printing and settle for the text/plain
version for reading within the UA for the sake of efficiency.

Brian