The text below contains portions of [yet] another e-mail from timeless. I'm posting this with the permission of timeless.
The indented "> " portions of the e-mail are my own comments from the previous post. The non-indented portions are by timeless. =============================================================== > I'm starting to wonder how practical it would be to append text info > to the end of each alternate version of the message body. imo it isn't. > I expect it'd be trivial for plain text at least. Agreed > It might be a little tricky for html i'd go with impossible. there could be css, dhtml, comments, parsing quirks, ... > at the very least it would require a more intelligent insertion > algorithm. > I expect it wouldn't be > practical to use code from the html editor to read and parse the > structure of the html, insert text in the appropriate place in the > data structures, and save the html back to the e-mail; since there'd > likely be formatting differences in the resulting html, and possibly > even loss of data (if there was some very non-standard content), > versus how it was originally. > > The simplest method that comes to mind for html is to search for the > "</body>" tag and insert the text info (formatted as necessary for > html) just before the tag. Hopefully that would be reasonably > reliable. it isn't. > But I'd wonder about any other present or future alternate versions > besides plain text and html, perhaps xml or formats that haven't even > been thought up yet. Any other types of alternate versions would > presumably need to have the text info appended to them also. What if > the formatting of some versions was very non-trivial, perhaps > encrypted? or signed :-) > I'm wondering if this approach would open up a big, ugly can of > worms, one that might not be obvious at first. i think we can predict 20% of the worms, and they're all really nasty. the rest will be worse :-( > The only safeguard I can think of for this offhand, is to disable > deletion of attachments for e-mail that has alternate versions that > the deletion algorithm doesn't support at the time. sometimes doing things halfway works, but more often than not you end up regretting them because you get many complaints saying that what you did was broken... > That could be extended > further to disable the deletion functionality for any situation that > the overall deletion algorithm can't handle, though it could be > confusing to the user as to why the functionality is sometimes > unavailable. yeah confusing and likely to get more bugs filed complaining that it doesn't work. > In some ways it'd be cleaner and simpler to keep the attachment and > just replace the attachment data with text info, but, as described > [earlier], I have some concerns about that approach too. i know that i've been leaning towards this approach, i know there can be complications but i think it's better than the alternatives. > One important thing to note with appending text info to the end of > each alternate version of the message body, is that if it was > implemented and it later became necessary to remove or replace that > functionality, it wouldn't pose a problem for any e-mails that had > already been altered; they could still be accessed just as well, with > the visibile indication of the alteration still being just as > obvious. This approach doesn't depend on maintaining any special > functionality for the e-mail to be adequately accessible after it's > been altered; it's a "set it and forget it" approach, as far as the > e-mail client is concerned, and a "set it and permanently remind them" > approach, as far as the user goes, regardless of which e-mail client > or which version of Mozilla the user uses in the future. I think any approach we [hah, we=you :-)] take has to be able to work pretty well even if the feature ceases to exist. [end of comments from timeless -Matt] ==================================================================== As stated earlier, the indented "> " portions of the above text are my own comments from the previous post. The non-indented portions are by timeless. -- Matt Coughlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] <remove "sp4mless_" from the e-mail address to reply>
