HTML alternative part is default & broken

[Lynn Kerby <lfk kerbit net>]

I've been back in the dark ages of Balsa for quite some time (was running
1.1.6 with a few patches for personal preferences) and recently decided to
update to a more recent version (1.4.1 at the moment).  Since I've been
following the mailing list, I knew that there had been some significant
changes and overall it looks really good.

One of my biggest concerns is that Balsa displays the HTML portion of
multipart/alternative messages by default (with gtkHTML enabled), and
that it doesn't fully support the gtkHTML message display.  I suspect
that it is a conscious decision not to support the "url_requested" signal
from the gtkHTML library, but my question is why?  If HTML message
display is the default (and there doesn't appear to be a preferences
setting to tell it otherwise), then I think Balsa is actually doing
a disservice by selecting the HTML and then botching the presentation.

I suggested Balsa to a friend who is pretty new to Linux and was looking
for a nice GUI based mail client.  One of his first questions after
getting Balsa installed/configured was how come the messages he got from
NetFlix were full of lots of empty boxes?  I was pretty sure that I knew
the answer from the snippits of discussions here on the list, but I'd
never run Balsa linked with gtkHTML so I didn't know for sure until
recently.

Is someone working on using ghttp or something to provide the missing
functionality?  Should I?

-- 
Lynn Kerby <mailto:lfk@kerbit.net>