Open Bug 1572648 Opened 2 years ago Updated 2 months ago

support rich embedding (previews) of links in composed content (oEmbed, Twitter Card, Open Graph data)

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, enhancement)

Product:
Thunderbird
Component:
Message Compose Window
Type:
enhancement
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

People

(Reporter: mkmelin, Unassigned)

Details

We should enable making the content of mails from our users look great. Other platforms usually enhance embedded links by providing previews or direct access.

There are standard ways to do this:

Open Graph and Twitter card is basically supported on all news sites (etc.) due to the the size of Facebook and Twitter. Youtube and many other media giants support oEmbed.

We should definitely put some resources on this.

I was surprised to see this filed as a compose item (and not a display item). Are you envisioning this as something that pops up when a user tries to paste in a Twitter link that asks "Do you want to display this is a pretty fashion?", if they click yes Thunderbird then inserts all the proper HTML and such? (Ignore the exact UX, just trying to illustrate the idea.)

I've wanted this for chat, although I can't find the bug at the moment, but had always assumed it would be on display (e.g. a user sends us a Twitter link and the Thunderbird UI finds it and embeds the pretty content somehow).

The implementation should make it easy to hook up both cases. I was primarily thinking about it for compose due to previous experience with it - BuddyPress/Wordpress uses oEmbed for writing statuses/posts. Also Open Graph includes in Facebook does the lookup on compose (it seems).

Doing it for the compose stage should make it easier to create pretty things when you compose, and gives more control.

For compose, UX wise I think it could work pretty much like when you create a message with link on Facebook: It adds the card below and you can inspect it and remove if you want (with an X on the corner).

For receiving, UX is more difficult and needs more consideration on what to show and when. Not to mention security/privacy is more of an issue than when it's a link you yourself added to a message.

We should enable making the content of mails from our users look great. Other platforms usually enhance embedded links by providing previews or direct access.

Note that "remove it if you want" is still too intrusive for users not interested in the feature.

And - if this feature is introduced, I ask that there be:

  • At least 3 settings: Disable, preview in a pop-up, preview in message body.
  • A separate default setting regarding the feature for text and HTML messages (and other types if those become supported, e.g. Markdown).

Finally, when this is disabled, that the link contents will not be silently collected and merely hidden. i.e. that we not introduce additional network activity unless this feature is actually desired.

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