no button for hidden MIME part

no button for hidden MIME part

[Matt McClure]

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In the following attached message, pgnus 0.96 hides the text/html part
and does not display any button for it unless I do
gnus-summary-toggle-display-buttonized which toggles the variable
gnus-inhibit-mime-unbuttonizing.  Gnus-inhibit-mime-unbuttonizing
appears to be for the internal implementation only.  The *-treat-*
variables have no effect on the buttonizing of the text/html part.  Is
there another way to get the button to display?  I would have had no
idea there was an attachment if the text of the message hadn't referred
to it.



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Dear Matthew McClure,

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Director of Membership Marketing

P.S.  If you are HTML enabled, check out the convenient eFax
card in the attachment.
------------------------------------------------------------
You've received this email because you are registered as an
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please click here:
http://info.efax.com/r/r0.4?D3cet2C3EJTrcDb7dfQDsh7Ll8lwhKc10TK-v42CUHGpGyl7eaMZz-WxN530d".


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-- 
                --------------------------------------
                | matthew.mcclure.es.99@aya.yale.edu |
                |  http://www.faradic.net/~mmcclure  |
                --------------------------------------

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[Lee Willis]

Matt McClure <matthew.mcclure.es.99@aya.yale.edu> writes:

> In the following attached message, pgnus 0.96 hides the text/html part
> and does not display any button for it unless I do
> gnus-summary-toggle-display-buttonized which toggles the variable
> gnus-inhibit-mime-unbuttonizing.  Gnus-inhibit-mime-unbuttonizing
> appears to be for the internal implementation only.  The *-treat-*
> variables have no effect on the buttonizing of the text/html part.  Is
> there another way to get the button to display?  I would have had no
> idea there was an attachment if the text of the message hadn't referred
> to it.

There isn't an attachement as such. The text/plain and text/html parts
are "alternatives". That is they are supposed to contain the same
information, but one is given as text and one as html. Gnus displays
whichever it can, but also references mm-discouraged-alternatives and
probably some others as well when making it's decision. For example my
mm-discouraged-alternatives contains

("text/html" "text/richtext")

because I prefer to see plain text over launching w3 to view text/html
when the same information is in both. If someone sends you a message
flagged with mulitpart-alternative and the parts differ in content then
they are broken.

Hope this clarifies things
Lee.
-- 
I was doing object-oriented assembly at 1 year old ...  
For some reason my mom insists on calling it "Playing with blocks"

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[Alan Shutko]

Matt McClure <matthew.mcclure.es.99@aya.yale.edu> writes:

> I would have had no idea there was an attachment if the text of the
> message hadn't referred to it.

IMHO, it's the sender's fault.  The mail was multipart/alternative,
which means that it's the same content, different renderings.  In this
case, it _wasn't_ the same content, so they should have used
multipart/mixed.


-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors!
The person who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[David S. Goldberg]

The short answer is that the people at efax don't understand the
difference between multipart/mixed (what you get when you add
attachments) and multipart/alternative in which case you give two
presentations of the same thing.  They used the latter when they
should have used the former given the nature of the message.  However,
it looks like you must have set mm-discouraged-alternatives to include
text/html since that is not set by default and therefore gnus should
have presented you with the html rather than the plain text.
-- 
Dave Goldberg
Post: The Mitre Corporation\MS B325\202 Burlington Rd.\Bedford, MA 01730
Phone: 781-271-3887
Email: dsg@mitre.org

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[Matt McClure]

Date: 22 Oct 1999 10:39:27 -0400
From: Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org>

> Matt McClure <matthew.mcclure.es.99@aya.yale.edu> writes:
> 
> > I would have had no idea there was an attachment if the text of the
> > message hadn't referred to it.
> 
> IMHO, it's the sender's fault.  The mail was multipart/alternative,
> which means that it's the same content, different renderings.  In this
> case, it _wasn't_ the same content, so they should have used
> multipart/mixed.

I'm not familiar with what the different content types mean, but I'll
take your word for it.

However, to quote the Gnus manual:

  Unfortunately, people are quite bad at writing, so there are tons of
  functions and variables to make reading these articles easier.

I think Gnus should still try to compensate for broken messages such as
this.

-- 
                --------------------------------------
                | matthew.mcclure.es.99@aya.yale.edu |
                |  http://www.faradic.net/~mmcclure  |
                --------------------------------------

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[Matt McClure]

Date: 22 Oct 1999 10:52:05 -0400
From: dsg@mitre.org (David S. Goldberg)

> However, it looks like you must have set mm-discouraged-alternatives
> to include text/html since that is not set by default and therefore
> gnus should have presented you with the html rather than the plain
> text.

Actually, mm-discouraged-alternatives is nil.  Is this a bug, or could
something else be controlling which part I see?

-- 
                --------------------------------------
                | matthew.mcclure.es.99@aya.yale.edu |
                |  http://www.faradic.net/~mmcclure  |
                --------------------------------------

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[David S. Goldberg]

> I think Gnus should still try to compensate for broken messages such
> as this.

How would you propose to compensate for it such that the solution
wouldn't treat all alternatives as attachments (your sample is the
first one I've ever seen in which someone incorrectly sent an
attachment as an alternative)?  It seems to me that the easiest
solution, if you expect to get this sort of thing often, is to set
gnus-unbuttonized-mime-types to nil and get buttons for everything.
-- 
Dave Goldberg
Post: The Mitre Corporation\MS B325\202 Burlington Rd.\Bedford, MA 01730
Phone: 781-271-3887
Email: dsg@mitre.org

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[David S. Goldberg]

> Actually, mm-discouraged-alternatives is nil.  Is this a bug, or
> could something else be controlling which part I see?

Hmm.  Yes, I see that too if I set it to nil.  And the text/html is
specified last in the list of alternatives in that particular message.
This does look like a bug.  I don't see anything documented that would
prevent the html from being preferred in that case.
-- 
Dave Goldberg
Post: The Mitre Corporation\MS B325\202 Burlington Rd.\Bedford, MA 01730
Phone: 781-271-3887
Email: dsg@mitre.org

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[David S. Goldberg]

OK, I figured out why it didn't work for me.  Maybe you've got the
same issue:

in my .gnus I have:

(setq mm-automatic-display (delete "text/html" mm-automatic-display))

By commenting out that line and restarting xemacs and gnus, I got the
text/html as the preferred alternative in your sample message.
-- 
Dave Goldberg (G022)
dsg@mitre.org
MS B325
Bedford x3887

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[Laura Conrad]

>>>>> "Matt" == Matt McClure <matthew.mcclure.es.99@aya.yale.edu> writes:

    Matt> In the following attached message, pgnus 0.96 hides the
    Matt> text/html part and does not display any button for it...


I got the same message (from efax), and was going to report what seems 
to me to be an even worse problem with it -- I read my mail offline,
and when w3 renders the html in this message, it insists on trying to
contact the home website to find the logo.  I have to hit ^G to make
it stop trying.  The message it prints is:

Contacting resources.etracks.com:80

I have reported similar problems in the past, and it doesn't seem to
happen as often as it did with earlier versions of pgnus.  Is there
a fix that should have been applied to this situation, as well?

-- 
Laura (mailto:lconrad@world.std.com , http://www.world.std.com/~lconrad/ )
(617) 661-8097	fax: (801) 365-6574 
233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[Matt McClure]

Date: 22 Oct 1999 11:30:59 -0400
From: dsg@mitre.org (David S. Goldberg)

> > I think Gnus should still try to compensate for broken messages such
> > as this.
> 
> How would you propose to compensate for it such that the solution
> wouldn't treat all alternatives as attachments (your sample is the
> first one I've ever seen in which someone incorrectly sent an
> attachment as an alternative)?  

Hmmm.  Perhaps it should be possible to buttonize alternatives without
buttonizing all attachments.  Or would that cause some other kind of
confusion?

> It seems to me that the easiest solution, if you expect to get this
> sort of thing often, is to set gnus-unbuttonized-mime-types to nil and
> get buttons for everything.

Thanks for the tip.

-- 
                --------------------------------------
                | matthew.mcclure.es.99@aya.yale.edu |
                |  http://www.faradic.net/~mmcclure  |
                --------------------------------------

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[Toby Speight]

Matt> Matt McClure <URL:mailto:matthew.mcclure.es.99@aya.yale.edu>

0> In <URL:news:hpwvsfbad3.fsf@shell.faradic.net>, Matt wrote:

Matt> Perhaps it should be possible to buttonize alternatives without
Matt> buttonizing all attachments.  Or would that cause some other
Matt> kind of confusion?

I think we should change the name and behaviour of
`gnus-unbuttonized-mime-types'.  Instead of being a list of MIME types
that should not be given buttons when rendered, we need a more general
mapping from MIME type to part presentation.  This would mean that I
could write something like

(setq gnus-mime-presentation-map
      '(("multipart/alternative" . (button))
        ("message/rfc-?822" . (line-after))
        ("text/.*" . nil)
        (".*/.*" . (button line-after))))

and have the presentation be determined by the first match.  'button
and 'line-after are the two presentations that come immediately to
mind, but I'm sure there are others.

(I've used fully-dotted notation for clarity above - obviously it's
not strictly necessary).

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[Kai Großjohann]

Matt McClure <matthew.mcclure.es.99@aya.yale.edu> writes:

> Hmmm.  Perhaps it should be possible to buttonize alternatives without
> buttonizing all attachments.  Or would that cause some other kind of
> confusion?

I also think that it would be good to always buttonize alternatives.
Are we taking a poll?   ;-)

kai
-- 
Life is hard and then you die.

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[Per Abrahamsen]

Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> I also think that it would be good to always buttonize alternatives.

I don't think it should be default.  The default behaviour should be
optimal for correct MIME messages.  Also, it might make someone send
attachments as alternatives, because they like the UI.

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Laura Conrad <lconrad@world.std.com> writes:

> I got the same message (from efax), and was going to report what seems 
> to me to be an even worse problem with it -- I read my mail offline,
> and when w3 renders the html in this message, it insists on trying to
> contact the home website to find the logo.

That's not good.

This is the function Gnus uses to format an HTML buffer:

(defun mm-w3-prepare-buffer ()
  (require 'w3)
  (let ((url-standalone-mode t))
    (w3-prepare-buffer)))

Are there some more variables Gnus should bind to inhibit w3 going out
over the network?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: no button for hidden MIME part

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Toby Speight <Toby.Speight@streapadair.freeserve.co.uk> writes:

> I think we should change the name and behaviour of
> `gnus-unbuttonized-mime-types'.  Instead of being a list of MIME types
> that should not be given buttons when rendered, we need a more general
> mapping from MIME type to part presentation.  This would mean that I
> could write something like
> 
> (setq gnus-mime-presentation-map
>       '(("multipart/alternative" . (button))
>         ("message/rfc-?822" . (line-after))
>         ("text/.*" . nil)
>         (".*/.*" . (button line-after))))

I think that this sounds like The Gnus Way To Do It -- provide a
mechanism to let the used decide for herself how these things should
be displayed.  (Especially with something that's so individual as a
user interface, where people are not used to the, ahem, superior¹ Gnus
MIME display methodology.  :-)

-----
¹) Meaning "controversial".

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen