Re: Scrollbars .. part two

[Philip Van Hoof <freax pandora be>]

> We had a discussion about this when the current message preview was 
> implemented. We considered having three scrollable parts, with and
without 
> resieable panels for each part  but they did not seem very practical. We 
> came to conclusion that having one scrolled part is a best way as it 
> utilizes the "real estate" best (we did not notice that text selection
got 
> broken).

> How this is really solved in other programs? Would removing attachment 
> icons make an improvement?

In pan, the headers are like in my patch, they are always visible
and seperated from the message-body as labels. Unless you have gtkhtml
compiled in pan .. then pan creates an HTML page of the message and
displays that HTML page in the gtkhtml widget.

However, using pan as reference is maybe not good since attachments
are not very importand when reading news (most of the times spam or
warez anyway). Most E-Mails however do contain usefull attachments.

Thats why I made the gnome_icon_list always visible in my patch:
"if" I the mail has attachments, I want to select the easily and 
fast, if it does not have attachments; I want more text from the
message body to read.

The only issue for me is the headers entry. It would be better if
this part would scroll with the message body. But then the selection
gets broken (and that really irritates me sometimes). Customizing
the widget -> hack on it using that motion_event is braking default
gnome/gtk+ behaviour and might confuse users. (For me, that would
be a solution). And it's pretty difficult and causes clumbsy code 
to get such a hack working.

What I would do (in case I would make my own E-Mail client) is to 
include the Headers in the mimetext widget of the messagebody with
another font (bold). But that would be a major change in balsa. I
don't think it would be a good solution for "balsa" .. or a lot 
should be changed then.


Netscape messenger: 

Displays as HTML (<PRE>message body</PRE>) and adds a table
with all attachments listed as URL's at the bottom of the
message.


-- 
Philip van Hoof aka freax (http://www.freax.eu.org)
irc: irc.openprojects.net mailto:freax @ linux.be