39370 - Format=flowed class not used for quoting

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: MIME, defect, P3)

Description

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

One of the big advantages of format=flowed is, that the client can savely rewrap
quotes, avoiding that other mailers mess them up by rewrapping them badly.*

We are supposed to support flowed, we should insert flowing paragraphs as such
and not fixed lines in the composer while quoting. I.e. use HTML-style quoting
even for nested flowed quotes.

Currently
1. we don't used the flowed class at all for quoting, but the normal plain text
class, which of course results in lots of hard linebreaks.
2. the flowed class doesn't seem to handle the quoting case (where less 
formatting is needed, the sig should be removed etc.).

This bug will be some work, but is important to fix.

Assigning to rhp for now.

*
<quote src="ftp://venera.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2646.txt">
1.  Abstract

   Interoperability problems have been observed with erroneous labelling
   of paragraph text as Text/Plain, and with various forms of
   "embarrassing line wrap." (See section 3.)

   Attempts to deploy new media types, such as Text/Enriched [RICH] and
   Text/HTML [HTML] have suffered from a lack of backwards compatibility
   and an often hostile user reaction at the receiving end.

[...]

3.2.  Embarrassing Line Wrap

   As Text/Plain messages get quoted in replies or forwarded messages,
   the length of each line gradually increases, resulting in
   "embarrassing line wrap." This results in text which is at best hard
   to read, and often confuses attributions.

      Example:

            >>>>>>This is a comment from the first message to show a
            >quoting example.
            >>>>>This is a comment from the second message to show a
            >quoting example.
            >>>>This is a comment from the third message.
            >>>This is a comment from the fourth message.

   It can be confusing to assign attribution to lines 2 and 4 above.
</quote>

Comment 1

[Daniel Bratell]

Ben, do you think mimetpfl will be ready to use with your changes in 31906?

Have you identified what need to be done and can summarize it here?

Comment 2

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

- It misses some special cases for the quoting case. IIRC, I fixed it in some

cases, but not all. Shouldn't be too hard to fix, but not trivial.

- We really shouldn't send out nbsp just to get fixed lines. We have to use pre

at least in the quoting case (better always IMO). This change is a bit larger; I

did the first small steps with the (by default diabled) flag FLOWED_PRE. It is

solveable, though. E.g.

  - quoting

    - flowed paragraphs*: pre wrap

    - fixed lines: pre wrap

  - viewing wrap=on

    - flowed paragraphs*: pre wrap

    - fixed lines: pre wrap

  - viewing wrap=off

    - flowed paragraphs*: pre wrap

    - fixed lines: pre

  *the whole paragraph is one ling line; the same as the qp text converter does

The proposed tags are open for discussion.



No, I didn't do much for this, because

- the class is very hard for me to read, becausue the writing style is so

different to mine.

- flowed doesn't work on Unix currently (I filed a bug).

Comment 3

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Task about   (see my last comment) moved to bug 39728.

Comment 4

[pmock]

Changing qa assign to [e-mail]

Comment 5

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

2. in the inital description moved to bug 40862. This (39370) bug is now only
about actually using mimetpfl for quoting, if the source is format=flowed.
Shouldn't be hard, but will most likely have to be done by rhp (i.e. not me).

Comment 6

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

This was an easy kill. Took me ~1 min to figure out what's wrong :). Attaching
patch.

Comment 7

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

ASSIGNING to me.

rhp or Daniel (whoever wrote the original bits), can you review please?

Comment 8

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

BTW: This bug propably appeared because of bug 40862.

Comment 9

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Attachment: Fix 1.

Comment 10

[Daniel Bratell]

Ben, can you make sure that this doesn't break bug 23418 and bug 29267, the 
reasons that exception was done. 

Comment 11

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Daniel, bug 23418 seems to be unrelated. Commented on 29267.

BTW: Found bug 43388 during testing (in case you will run into it while doing so
as well).

Comment 12

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Fix checked in.

Comment 13

[pmock]

Verified as fixed on win32, linux, and macos using the following builds:
 win32 commercial seamonkey build 2000-102509-mn6 installed on P500 Win98
 linux commercial seamonkey build 2000-102509-mn6 installed on P200 RedHat 6.2
 macos commercial seamonkey build 2000-102508-mn6 installed on G3/400 OS 9.04