Re: Pterodactyl Gnus v0.46 is released

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

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

> Anyway, perhaps we should just drop the buttons for all the text/plain
> parts totally?

Yes.  They are noisy, and not useful.

> It's not like anyone wants to toggle those parts...  although I guess
> people might want to save them separately and stuff.  Hm.

I really think we should try to see MIME and HTML as two different ways
(the old and the new) to produce _unified_ multimedia presentations.
In some case, extraction of parts is related to the presentation, like
for file transmission types, but in other cases, like text or image types,
they are not.

It would not come to mind to have heavy mechanics and buttons in an
HTML browser to extract substrings of the overall page.  The same spirit
should apply to MIME in Gnus.  It is only normal that one should resort
to special unusual devices to extract substrings, like calling for the
HTML sources and using an editor, or the overall cut-an-paste mechanics
of the window system.  In Gnus, if one wants to really fiddle with MIME
internals, one can use either `C-u g', possibly combined with `C-d', to
access internals, or intimate parts of a MIME message.

MIME usually have heavy user interface implementations.  Gnus could try
to do better, and have something lightier by default.  I would hope from a
good MUA that it hides MIME complexities from me, instead of revealing them,
the same as good HTML browsers do.  The constant goal might be that MIME is
not much heavier than HTML, everywhere it is reasonable that it stays light.

Handling textual parts separately, with buttons and such, is overkill in
the default presentation.  Moreover, I do not think it really fits the
original intent of MIME.  When it's more of an internal/binary/dissection
matter, then it should be kept out of the way.  `C-d' only exists as a
way to resolve in advance some accessory, less important needs, *so* that
a MIME-viewer could later be tackled with a more free design, not to be
uncumbered with things not really meant to be there.

I've not yet seen a MIME-viewer that reaches the unified presentation
intent of Nathaniel Boreinstein, yet it's true I'm far from having seen them
all :-).  I would surely like that Gnus avoids the usual mere-bag-of-tricks
approach to MIME, and rather become a real good MIME viewer.

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