Re: Hard-coded colors

[Albrecht Dreß <albrecht dress arcor de>]

Am 06.03.04 14:04 schrieb(en) Misu Moldovan:
> But are these colors really needed? After all, the icons are colored
> already and are pretty self-explanatory.

The text in the message header space gives a little more detailed  
information about the signature status than the icon in the message list.  
I tried to implement something like a "traffic light": green is a fully  
trusted good signature, yellow a good signature with insufficient trust  
and/or validity, and red a bad signature, which can have a lot of  
different reasons. A blue (not from the traffic light; maybe steel? ;-) 
padlock in the message list indicates encryption.

> Or even better, get rid of the extra line that informs you that
> the signature is valid/invalid and rely on the icon alone. Or at
> least give us back the full control over the displayed headers and
> make it possible to disable that line.

Well, you always have a detailed signature info for each signed part, and  
of course you can switch to the structure view tab to see more  
information, so in this respect you're right. On the other hand, the icon  
in the message list reflects a *combined* crypto status. Remember that a  
signed message may contain an other (e.g. forwarded) signed message with  
*different* crypto status. You may nest this over several levels, which  
makes things quite complicated. So the scheme for the message list is as  
follows:

- a blue padlock says that the message is encrypted, but the signature may  
be bad;
- a red one says that at least one signature of that message (if there is  
more than one) is bad, but others may be good;
- a yellow one says that the message contains all good signatures, but at  
least one has insufficient trust/validity and
- only if the icon is green, *all* signatures are good and trusted at  
least marginally.

So in the end (and this was the reason for me to implement it this way) I  
think the combination of the padlock and the short status in the header  
gives a good clue about which parts of a message are trustworthy and which  
not, without the need to switch to the tree viev.

Cheers,
	Albrecht.


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