Re: Some bugs for balsa 2.0.2

["M. Thielker" <balsa t-data com>]

Hi,

On 2002.09.19 15:59 Peter Bloomfield wrote:
>    What is most critical, however, is that the user not
>    automatically be shown multiple versions of the same data.
>    Either the user should be shown the last recognized version or
>    should be given the choice.
> 
> Now Balsa shows the icon list, so the user is `given the choice', which 
> makes Balsa compliant. As I read that last sentence, that gives us a lot 
> of flexibility about what other options the user is given.

IMHO it's the UA's responsibility to offer the highest queality rendition 
the author intended to display, unless the user chooses differently.
"Given the choice" does not necessarily mean "Forced to do the same click 
over and over again". It's a clear case for yet another prefs option.
To be flexible, the user should be able to select an order of preference as 
well as a "not wanted" list. I could imagine a new notebook tab with 2 
lists. One, which is user a user orderable list and shows the formats the 
user is willing to see, in order of preference. The other is a 
checkbox-list that allows selection of formats to always exclude. So, HTML 
lovers would order text/html,text/rich/,text/plain while I would order 
text/plain text/html, text/rich and html haters might select text/plain 
only and disable text/html and text/rich.
If a message is available in text/html only and html is disabled, a dialog 
should ask the user if he wants to render it anyway.

The two abovementioned lists may be combined into one, which would have 
both checkboxes to indicate the formats wanted and be orderable to indicate 
preference. Cleaner, yet it raises more issues. There would need to be a 
way to add new mime types somehow, because an inclusion lists needs, by 
definition, to be complete, while an exclusion list does not.


Melanie