Re: [Evolution] Airplay for 8 Evo enhancement requests

[Nick Jenkins <nickpj gmail com>]

> > Mail: Spell check does not spell check an email's subject line
> > [Probably blocked by the WebKit composer transition?]
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=200683
> WebKit can do spell checking only in it's own widget. We will probably
> have to use some other existing spell checking solution.

This one was fixed yesterday by Milan Crha and should be in Evo 3.6 -
yay!

> > Mail: Remote images in HTML emails very slow to load and display,
> > blocks display of email until completed.[Unsure if this is affected
> > by WebKit?]
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=582591
> We are still fetching the images manually, but it's completely
> asynchronous and we use libsoup for it, so it's pretty fast now. Maybe
> we could close this bug already?

May I please ask: What Evo version was libsoup introduced in? I ask as I
don't know if Evo 3.2.2 has this, but this version still feels really
quite slow when displaying HTML messages with images.

Comparing how Evo shows an HTML message to how a browser shows an HTML
page, it subjectively feels like the difference is something like the
following, in pseudocode:

Evo single thread:
* Render blank page.
* Get HTML of message.
* Set main window status bar to "Formatting message..."
* For each image, in sequence:
  * Set main window status bar to "Retrieving %URL_of_picture%"
  * Open single connection to server.
  * Download image.
  * Close connection.
* End for loop
* Clear main window status bar.
* Render completed HTML email.

Versus:

Browser network thread:
* Get HTML of message.
* Whenever an image is needed, get that, in parallel, using any tricks
you like for faster speed, such as pipelining, reusing connections, etc.

Browser Display thread:
* Render blank page.
* While not done: every 100ms, render what you have, even if it's
incomplete.
* Render completed HTML page.

As a result, not only does the browser seem quicker, but I usually
always know what it's doing, so I don't experience that "what are you
doing?!" feeling. Even if one image on the page doesn't load, I can
still work out most of what's there, and keep going. But with Evo you're
looking at a blank grey page until it's all finished.

> I'll shamelessly throw my favorites into the ring
The more the merrier! I know very little about the those bugs, but they
all sound reasonable to me.

-- All the best,
Nick.