Re: No more buttons by default?

[Dale Hagglund <rdh@best.com>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Steinar Bang <sb@metis.no> writes:

> > The idea has been that the receipient would see the text to read
> > inline in the message, but would be provided with buttons to make it
> > easy for him to save it to a file.

> Right.  But that's not what the RFCs say that the reader should do.

I'm curious where you find this in the RFCs?  I've been browsing RFCs
2045 and 2046, and I haven't noticed anything that obviously implies
this, at least to me.

> Anyway -- even though I don't like the buttons much, there may be an
> argument that it should be easy to handle MIME parts independently.

In general, I don't buy the claim of equivalence between HTML and
MIME.  In HTML, the internal structure is hidden by the displayer
because the document is in some sense a unified whole.  To me, MIME is
more of a transport mechanism for carrying multiple loosely-coupled
pieces.  The structure is important, and should be displayed to the
user.

> However, the user must (I think) be given some visual clue as to where 
> each parts starts (and stops).  The buttons are too heavy, but can
> anyone come up with some other clue that would be less intrusive?

I agree that the current buttons takes up a lot of space, and aren't
the prettiest things imaginable.  But, I'd rather have buttons as they
are than no demarcation of the various body parts at all.

The only alternative I can think of is some sort of alternating
background color between for alternating background parts, ie, white,
light grey, white, light grey.  However, with this, I loose the
ability to easily identify the part number for commands like `2 b'
from the summary buffer.

Dale.