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Re: [Nmh-workers] semantics of mhshow -type and -part

2015-02-02 07:35:12
david wrote:
Paul F. wrote:

david wrote:
 > Paul F. wrote:
 >
 > > as an aside, i actually think "the sender's ranking" is a
 > > highly overrated, and possibly even obsolete concept these
 > > days, RFCs notwithstanding.
 >
 > I'm not sure about that.  My phone seems to handle it
 > (multipart/alternative) nicely.

and nmh does (or could) too, right now, if we were all willing to
hand html mail to our browsers for display.  but most of would
prefer to see text/plain over text/html,

mhn.defaults, by default, prefers text/html over text/plain.
You know that you can override that, right?

really?  how do i tell nmh to _prefer_ text/plain over text/html?  i'll
be genuinely shocked if there's a way.

i can block a type/subtype, or change the commands used to display that
type/subtype, but to my knowledge i can't tell mh to "prefer" one over
another in a way that wasn't expressed by the sender.  so i have a big
wrapper script littered with things like this:

    ptext()
    {
        MHSHOW=$Mail/mhn.block_html \
            mhshow -type text/plain "$@" | hilite | less
    }

    phtml_viewer()
    {
        MHSHOW=$Mail/mhn.html_live \
            mhshow -noconcat -type text/html "$@"
    }

    phtml_dump()
    {
        MHSHOW=$Mail/mhn.html_dump \
            mhshow -noconcat -type text/html "$@" | hilite | less
    }

and i also have an mh "part viewer" script that gives me one-keystroke
access to viewing any part of a message using the various viewers that
i prefer.  writing that has made my mime life tolerable, for the most
part.


or perhaps even choose which based on sender.

That's messier with mhn.defaults and/or the profile, but still
doable.

yup.  currently i don't select based on the sender, but i do
select based on the current folder:
        ...
        case $whoami-$curfold in
        pgf-nedod)  ptext $arg ;;
        pgf-rides)  ptext $arg ;;
        *)          pdefault $arg ;;
        esac
        ...

the sender's preferences have little to do with how i read my mail.



i'd like to see that made easier than it is
now, because while its nice to know what the "sender" would prefer
me to look at, that preference can be difficult for me to
accomodate.

 >
 > On the other hand, I have been getting emails with text/html and
 > text/plain in a multipart/related.  But those two text parts
 > appear to be just different representations of the same content,
 > so they really should be in a multipart/alternative.  I had been
 > thinking that these are mistakes.  But now I wonder if that's the
 > sender's way of punting the choice to the recipient.

does it matter?  again, this suggests that we need better mechanisms
for choosing among alternative mime parts in ways that are somewhat
independent of the sender's supposed preference.

In this case, the sender isn't indicating a preference.  So mhshow
shows all the alternatives.  I find that annoying, but at least
it's easy to avoid.

i'm just wishing all these problems should be so easy.

paul
=----------------------
 paul fox, pgf(_at_)foxharp(_dot_)boston(_dot_)ma(_dot_)us (arlington, ma, 
where it's 11.1 degrees)

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