Re: No more buttons by default?

["François Pinard" <pinard@IRO.UMontreal.CA>]

Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> writes:

> > Everything else is meant to be viewed as one complete, whole
> > document -- just like HTML.

> Are you saying that, from now on, there will be no way of saving an
> image found in the article buffer, without fiddling with
> `gnus-unbuttonized-mime-types'?

There are always ways!  But saving an image found in article buffer is
no different from saving an image found in an HTML page, and this is not
something which has to be a bold part of the MIME article viewer.

What you ask for is dissecting, with a scalpel, the intimate structure of
a MIME message, for removing or copying one constituent of the overall
presentation of the message.  Use `C-d' for that, combined with saving
commands.  I even guess Lars chose `C-d' because of the first letter of
the word "dissection".

The problem is that we are so uncomfortable with MIME that we desperately
want control over everything.  In my opinion, the uncomfort might come
from the fact we do not have many good MIME readers.  With a real good
reader, I do not think that the urge would be so great.

Intimate operations on the MIME structural entities should be something
driven from aside, and not encumber the reader.

> Or of hiding the image from the buffer?  Or of saving the textual types
> that happen not to be attachments?

When using an HTML browser, do you ask for hiding images from the display?
There is no such strong reason to do so.  Do you ask for saving substrings
on the page?  You just cust and paste them elsewhere, but you do not ask
the browser to have special provisions.  Just think the same.

> Saying "MIME is like HTML" is IMO missing the point of MIME.

Maybe we are not missing it that much, after all.  Yet, there are indeed
a few MIME aspects which are widely different, for instance, like part
reassembly of a file split in many messages.  MIME attempts to be many things
at once, and this throw some confusion.  But surely, it is a rather frequent
use of MIME to produce multimedia messages meant for unified presentation.

One cannot expect that a single paradigm will cover everything at once that
MIME tries to be.  Maybe that some of the weakness of many MIME readers
comes from trying to build on too few paradigms.  Better use many paradigms
as needed, and implement each of them very well.  It looks likely to me
that an intelligent reader could determine, from the structure of a MIME
message, what is its intent, and choose a suitable paradigm for that intent.

> But I don't see anything wrong with the current buttonized approach,
> especially if it were accompanied with a decent Summary-based viewing mode.

Hiding images or not, or saving images or text fragments on disk, is not
fundamentally what one would expect from a unified presentation.  If I was
hard debugging an HTML browser, year after year, maybe I would add a great
deal of buttons to trigger and untrigger things, to help me in my job.
I always had the sad impression that most MIME readers are kind of never
ending debugging versions.  Even if fun, buttons may be close to noise.

If the "decent Summary-based viewing mode" was giving access to the
intimate structure of the MIME message, it would still be a debugging tool.
MIME was surely not meant to be dissected all the time.  There is something
inherently not healthy in the concept of constant surgery. :-)

-- 
François Pinard                            mailto:pinard@iro.umontreal.ca
Join the free Translation Project!    http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard