Here are more unhappy experiences from a user who would dearly like to
be enthusiastic. These are not obscure or insignificant problems. I am
not looking for bugs - just reporting problems I encounter.
The display of message subjects, senders on Mozilla is harder to read
than with Netscape. The Mozilla font has less height - it seems
squashed vertically. Mozilla line spacing on my monitor is 5.9 mm.
Netscape is 5.0 mm. So Mozilla is making better use of the screen. The
courier font used for the messages themselves seems identical and is
fine for both programs. (I am using 1024 x 768.)
I compose an email with manually formatted points like:
1 - Somewhere, over the rainbow, lizzzzaaards fly. One day my
favourite lizard will fly so high, so high. La, laaa, la-la
li-laaa-laaahhh, blue birds fly.
I reopen the email from the drafts folder.
The above paragraph comes back as:
1 - Somewhere, over the rainbow, lizzzzaaards fly. One day my
favourite lizard will fly so high, so high. La, laaa, la-la
li-laaa-laaahhh, blue birds fly.
I correct this by deleting spaces.
Quite a few ordinary paragraphs often have a blank line inserted in them
- perhaps when the line before was reaching to the right margin. I
delete these.
The standard "Bcc:" line has been duplicated.
Because I unsure about how the message will look when it sent, I select
all the text and copy and paste it into a fresh email compose window
with the aim of sending it to myself. But two of the three point
paragraphs look like:
1 - Somewhere, over the rainbow, lizzzzaaards fly. One day my
favourite lizard will fly so high, so high. La, laaa, la-la
li-laaa-laaahhh, blue birds fly.
This corruption of the data in a simple copy and paste means it is
difficult to test the email before it goes out. (I am writing to a
large mailing list I moderate, and hundreds of people will read it - and
I am fussy about layout so I want it right.) I open the draft again in
another window, correct the extra spaces and send it to myself.
The impossibility of opening a new mail folder in a new window is
driving me nuts. Right clicking is no help - that just turns the
current window into the right-clicked mail folder. So the only way of
opening another mail folder is to make the current window and the new
one open in the new folder (each taking its own time to do this) and
then manually change one of them back to the original mail folder.
Each time I do this, I have to manually select the bottom of the
folder's contents to reach the most recent emails.
I open the draft a second time and again this results again in the
paragraphs taking the form:
1 - Somewhere, over the rainbow, lizzzzaaards fly. One day my
favourite lizard will fly so high, so high. La, laaa, la-la
li-laaa-laaahhh, blue birds fly.
I delete the space which seems to have been added - in this case by
deleting the spaces to the left of "f" and "l". I send it to myself.
In the Inbox mail spool, the paragraphs still have the extra space - but
Mozilla displays it without the extra space!
I open that same draft again. This time I delete the spaces at column 1
to make it look right again. I send it to myself. The results look
correct in the mail spool file but Mozilla displays them as:
1 - Somewhere, over the rainbow, lizzzzaaards fly. One day my
favourite lizard will fly so high, so high. La, laaa, la-la
li-laaa-laaahhh, blue birds fly.
This is intolerable. Corruption of user data and false display of user
and received data means the user cannot communicate reliably with other
people.
I look forward to the whitespace problems of Mozilla being solved!
Maybe then a "plain text" version of the HTML editor will work - but it
seems bizarre to me that such an approach is used when the unique
requirements of plain text email editing are not hard to code from
scratch, but are in some ways beyond the scope of what HTML was designed
to do, and have nothing to do with HTML anyway. I get a feeling here of
corruption of the simple and elegant by the over-complex, for reasons
perhaps including:
1 - The admirable reason of generalising an editor and then using
specific parameters of its behaviour to synthesise particular
sets of functionality.
2 - Lack of appreciation for the value of plain text - based on
some view that "complex and flexible = better" and therefore
that HTML is superior to plain text. For most communication, I
adamant that it is not. (The arguments are many - let me know
if you want me to forward an email I wrote about it to another
list.)
3 - Over-focus on fancy visuals and the proliferating complexity
of HTML leading to a lack of appreciation of the need for direct,
simple, plain text editing with direct, visible manual control of
right margins and the preservation of soft CRs when the draft is
saved.
4 - The fact that some people write really sloppily anyway -
especially as IM practices are copied in email - probably
contributes to a lack of appreciation of the value of direct,
non-proportionally spaced, text.
(I recognise that Mozilla aims to achieve a lot of this - whereas
Netscape Navigator and many other email programs are really lousy in
respect of allowing the user to see and control what their email will
actually look like when it is sent. This is part of the degeneration
which has occurred as software has more complex. Pegasus Mail used to
be nearly perfect for plain text editing - but that changed when the
program was rewritten to handle HTML.)
The work of adding an email/news-specific plain text editor with the
correct behaviour to Mozilla seems daunting, since the editor doesn't
work on text at all - but on the data as abstracted into complex linked
data-structures by the layout code. Also, there would have to be work
on the code which reads files into the data structure and writes them
out again. Point 1 above is in some ways inevitable, since we are
using a display and keyboard/pointing device/cursor interface which is
created for HTML.
Until then, I will minimise my use of Mozilla to printing emails with
the correct date in the bottom right hand corner! I am going back to
Netscape 4.76 for everything else.
I am sending this with Netscape 4.76 and adding these posts to:
http://gair.firstpr.com.au/public-files/mozilla-bugs/
These bug reports reflect ordinary experience. These bugs should not be
hard to reproduce. If you don't hear any more reports from me for a
while, it is because I cannot use Mozilla's with its current behaviour.
- Robin
