Re: RFC: How should HTML archives be viewed?

From: "Shane Clintberg" <shaneclintberg@PROTECTED>

In-Reply-To: RFC: How should HTML archives be viewed?

Date: August 6th 2005

I wanted you guy's opinion on how HTML archive messages should be viewed At the moment HTML messages are stuck in a iFrame, to preserve any formatting that they may have The rub on this is, well, it's stuck in an iFrame and there's an extra scroll bar and it doesn't really work well with anything else

Scrollbar, schmollbar -- I think the iframe looks fine, once you remove its extra CSS-styled border! And as far as its /function/ goes, it seems like a perfectly appropriate solution to the problem, and one that would apply equally well to "Sent as a Webpage" messages

Note: your putting the message content within the iframe element is unnecessary Leaving it empty as follows:

works just as well and makes it not just an "appropriate" solution, but an elegant one as well

Mind you, this is a dev list so I'm not surprised my opinion is in the minority (so far) ;-)

4) Just change the tag of the HTML message to: , like Yahoo! Mail does - thus having the web browser disregard all the information in the tag (sort sloppy, breaks XHTML compatibility)

If you do decide on the inline solution/option, a less sloppy (and XHTML-compatible) way of doing this would be to change to:

instead And at minimum -- which means you're deleting everything else before & after the ), you'd probably also want to any inline scripting the message might have, too, for security reasons

Of course, if you also want to keep any style in the , you could go beyond that (and continue to "do as Yahoo!"), by:

appending all internal stylesheet selectors with "message_body " (e g : "message_body p {}", "message_body * classtyle", etc );
and then writing that parsed stylesheet into the head of the Dada Mail page as a second element;

but if you go that route, I'd hope that:

this parsing is done & saved to a database when a message comes in, rather than on a case-by-case basis when it goes out; and
that it remains optional (so those who are perfectly happy with the iframe wouldn't have to put up with the extra processing/database bloat)

Some other "exciting" news:

I hacked in support of inline images in archive messages -

I also hacked together support for having quoted text be styled different in plain text archives messages -

Lovely stuff looks great!