68902 - thread-related columns (unread, total) are poorly named

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Jesse Ruderman]

There are two thread-related columns available, "unread" and "total".  I think 
those names are confusing, especially since they're always blank in e-mail (as 
opposed to in news), and since there's another column called "read".

I think "unread" should be renamed to "unread in thread" and "total" should be 
renamed to "total in thread".

It might also be good to rename the current "read" column (the one with the 
green diamonds) to "unread", since the purpose of the column is to point out 
unread messages, not read messages.

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bug 68903, which this bug might block.

Comment 2

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Jennifer, Robin & MPT, what do you think?  I can make this happen if we agree.

Comment 3

[jglick]

Because of space, the column names should be short, but a more descriptive 
tooltip for the column headers might be useful?

Comment 4

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

Please see bug 50952 for discussion regarding tooltips in column headings.  I
can always re-do that patch, but the XUL/JS still need to hooked up (something I
can't do yet.)

Comment 5

[timeless]

Attachment: rename them

well, the thing is that nothing forces the columns to be as wide as their
labels (this is a good thing), in practice my unread and total columns are so
narrow that i can't see any letters let alone the full word.

This means that we can make the column title even longer as long as we don't
change the first letters the user would see. As it happens, mozilla's controls
aren't silly/creative enough to do something illogical like showing the last
letters of the title first, so this patch is safe.

Comment 6

[jglick]

Tooltips for column headers are now implemented.

Comment 7

[timeless]

.

Comment 8

[Daniel Wang]

I prefer that this bug be WONTFIX'ed. If you hover the mouse cursor over the
columns, you see tooltips "Number of unread messages in thread" and "Total
number of messages in thread". At most, we should only change the labels for the
column chooser menu, not the column labels.

Comment 9

[timeless]

checked in