Async pre-treatment of articles

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Reading articles with pictures external pictures in them (for instance,
the Gwene groups) is somewhat awkward.  You first get the text, and then
a few second later, the pictures are filled in, and the text moves
around.  It's annoying.

I thought at first that the problem was that Emacs displayed the
pictures slowly, but the problem is probably just that it takes a while
for w3m to fetch the images.  Re-reading articles where w3m has cached
the images is very fast.

So my immediate idea would be to add some sort of async pre-rendering of
messages.  That is, from the nntp pre-fetch code (or somewhere), point
w3m at the message.  However, for that to happen, Gnus really has to do
all the decoding and charset stuff and Content-Transfer-Encoding stuff,
so that's a pretty big chunk of code to run from an async hook...

However, it occurs to me just now that if we special-case for CTE: 8bit,
then I could just point w3m at a throwaway buffer containing the next
article(s), and let it do its stuff there...

Would that be to special-casey for general usefulness? 

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