Bugzilla

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #8)
> Then of course, the bug is about keyboard navigation which is ultimately not helped by adding more options: you just add 3 cases that all need to work well, instead of one.

Regarding keyboard navigation: I think I will just use one-directional keyboard navigation. I'm leaning towards Up-Down since this is what we do for the 3pane attachment list and other richlistboxes. I don't think this area needs 2-dimensional keyboard navigation (which would normally be for `role=grid`, which would be more complicated).

> (Side note: we had view options for these for years, it was broken since many releases and nobody had noticed, so probably people didn't care. IIRC Henry removed the last remaints of that sometime in the last 6mo).

Yes, this was https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/a9015ae2a270 . We used to have tile view and large view, but this was for the attachment items, rather than the attachment layout. Moreover, it was a hidden preference not exposed in the UI. But I get the point about options being unused and degrading.

> Personally, for the look, I would get away from the griddy look we have, and just let the attachments have their natural width (up to some limit?)

The 3pane attachment list uses a grid-like display, the compose window uses a flex-wrapping display (which I think is what you want). It is the latter that users were unhappy with. Some users want a vertical list, which is easier to scan-read.

If we're worried about lots of options, we could just limit it to the two most important ones (and easiest to implement):

+ Compact (flex-wrap)
+ Single column (vertical list)

It would just be two CSS layouts:

```css
.compact {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: horizontal;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
}

.single-column {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: vertical;
}
```

Alternatively, if @aleca finds a nice way to display the attachment list as a column on the right hand side of the editor, we could only use `.compact` for the horizontal attachment bar, and `.single-column` for the vertical attachment bar.

In any case, I'm going to wait until after bug 1741361 before I do anything here since it'll help clean up this area. And, if we want to make similar changes to the 3pane attachment list, I might delay this until after bug 1732260 as well.

(In reply to Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] from comment #8)
> Then of course, the bug is about keyboard navigation which is ultimately not helped by adding more options: you just add 3 cases that all need to work well, instead of one.

Regarding keyboard navigation: I think I will just use one-directional keyboard navigation. I'm leaning towards Up-Down since this is what we do for the 3pane attachment list and other richlistboxes. I don't think this area needs 2-dimensional keyboard navigation (which would normally be for `role=grid`, which would be more complicated).

> (Side note: we had view options for these for years, it was broken since many releases and nobody had noticed, so probably people didn't care. IIRC Henry removed the last remaints of that sometime in the last 6mo).

Yes, this was https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/a9015ae2a270 . We used to have tile view and large view, but this was for the individual attachment items, rather than the attachment list layout. Moreover, it was a hidden preference not exposed in the UI. But I get the point about options being unused and degrading.

> Personally, for the look, I would get away from the griddy look we have, and just let the attachments have their natural width (up to some limit?)

The 3pane attachment list uses a grid-like display, the compose window uses a flex-wrapping display (which I think is what you want). It is the latter that users were unhappy with. Some users want a vertical list, which is easier to scan-read.

If we're worried about lots of options, we could just limit it to the two most important ones (and easiest to implement):

+ Compact (flex-wrap)
+ Single column (vertical list)

It would just be two CSS layouts:

```css
.compact {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: horizontal;
  flex-wrap: wrap;
}

.single-column {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: vertical;
}
```

Alternatively, if @aleca finds a nice way to display the attachment list as a column on the right hand side of the editor, we could only use `.compact` for the horizontal attachment bar, and `.single-column` for the vertical attachment bar.

In any case, I'm going to wait until after bug 1741361 before I do anything here since it'll help clean up this area. And, if we want to make similar changes to the 3pane attachment list, I might delay this until after bug 1732260 as well.