On Fri, 2003-02-21 at 17:33, Simon Josefsson wrote: > > Not really, why would you _need_ to get a list of all messages? Client > > can request the messages from server only when they become visible in > > screen. Scrollbar sizes and such can be generated from just the total > > amount of messages. Before the message is loaded from server, client > > could just show "loading .." instead of the from/to/subject/whatever. > > This assumes alot about the client that doesn't necessary hold. Not > all clients generate INBOX summaries dynamically based on where the > scrollbar is. Some clients doesn't even have a scroll bar.
Right, they don't do it, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't. If there's no scrollbar, that's even easier to handle then since there's probably just "next screenful" and "previous screenful" (and maybe top/bottom). > Generally I think it is more productive to stop regarding certain > client behaviour, that is valid according to the specification, as > broken or bad. I agree. If client doesn't work well for some specific use that user wants, there's always other clients that may work better for that purpose. > Of course, my preferences may be biased by > being an author of an IMAP client that wasn't designed around the > scrollbar paradigm... If client was designed well enough, I don't think it should be too difficult to modify to support fetching only visible messages. Others could simply contain dummy information with "not-fetched-yet" flag on.
