212535 - Mozilla should include style for <blockquote> while quoting messages

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

Description

[Tomer Cohen :tomer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624
Build Identifier: 

I've been noticed that people get my messages hardly readable, because the way I
send each reply message from Mozilla Mail/News. By looking in the sources, I
found that THEIR Mail/News applications (Outlook/Outlook express and others)
send each <blockquote> with properties to describe the way to show it in the
Mail Reader (black bar in the left side of the message), while Mozilla generate
<blockquote> without any parameters, than make use of the client-side style
rules to make the quote visible (blue bar by default).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:



Expected Results:  
While we can't make patch for each other mail reader exists, we should include
some simple styling rules in Mozilla Mail/News. 

Better if it will be possible for each user even to describe how he would prefer
his quotes (Outlook strong black bar, Mozilla thick blue bar, dotted, dashed,
whatever).

Comment 1

[Tomer Cohen :tomer]

Forgot to say, but I'm talking about HTML composition only. Not that we so like
it, but it has few features that text/plain doesn't, including the ability to
control the direction of the written text.

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

Isn't it the fault of the 'other' mailreaders, that they can't correctly show a
mail without style-tags. If we would pass something unreadable, like a
white-on-white color, then I can understand, but we're not passing anything ! We
leave it to the mail-reader to determine what should be used.

For your last question, see bug 209208

Comment 3

[Tomer Cohen :tomer]

AS I said, it is fault of the other mailreaders, but we can't release patch for
them, but for Mozilla. It's distastefulness to quote while only Mozilla
Mailreaders can see our message at it best, while others will see it broken.

To fix it, all we need is CSS rule attached for each reply, or each
<blockquote>, and that's only.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Dupe of bug 45268?

See also bug 210131.

(I don't think bug 209208 applies to this -- the 'style' mentioned in that bug 
is the 'quote before' vs 'quote after' preference.)

Comment 5

[Tomer Cohen :tomer]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Dupe of bug 45268?
That bug talks about support for older Mail Agents. Since we are in the present,
first, we need to support the competitors. 
> See also bug 210131.
That bug talks about defining colors. Generally, I'm thinking about changing the
blockquote style to include a left border, so Mail Agents which know noting
about the usage of blockquote in Mozilla will show something. 

Since it is possible to save mail messages as HTML, think about it as broken,
since Mozilla Browser itself don't know to draw that 1px solid blue line to
every <blockquote>.



This can be solver by a template, but I wish for a better default solution.

Comment 6

[Prognathous]

Tomer, I'm not sure that this blue line that you're referring to is due to HTML
and not due to Format Flowed plain text. Could you please send me such a mail to
[e-mail]">[e-mail] or at least, attach an .eml file to this bug?

Prog.

Comment 7

[Prognathous]

Bugzilla messed that email address, make that: [e-mail]

Prog.

Comment 8

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Prognathus, I believe you are misreading the bug.  Tomer is talking about HTML 
mail, and he *wants* to include a border style.  Right now, when Moz sends out 
an HTML mail that includes a quote, the quote is distinguished only with
  <blockquote type="cite">
and no including styling.  (And note, the 'type=cite' portion is nonstandard: 
bug 183219.)  Other, lamer mail clients don't do anything special to render that 
tag; by allowing included styling, he can control the appearance better.

Looking more closely at bug 45268, I'm not completely sure what was planned 
there.  I'm guessing that Ben was simply going to add a class attribute to the 
<blockquote> -- class="FormatFlowed" or "HTML" or what have you, so that the 
display could be styled per the *recipient's* preferences.

I suppose this issue could be handled with a template, as Tomer suggests, but 
the template implementation is pretty weak right now, particularly the inability 
to automatically use a template, or to use a template at all for a reply. (Bug 
107876, bug 21210.)

I'm confirming this, but really there is a lot of work that needs to be done in 
this area before a solution specific to this bug is going to come around.

Comment 9

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

> Looking more closely at bug 45268, I'm not completely sure what was planned 
> there.  I'm guessing that Ben was simply going to add a class attribute to the 
> <blockquote> -- class="FormatFlowed" or "HTML" or what have you

Correct.

I understand the problem and intention here, and I agree with the original reporter. It would be trivial for Outlook to add some 'user-agent CSS' (that concept exists in the spec) to style blockquote type=cite exactly like Outlook msgs. Why they don't do that we can onyl speculate. I also agree that the result is unfortunate, that it makes out users and app look bad, and that we probably can't make Microsoft add the CSS. Maybe we should try, though. Microsoft seems more reasonable recently.

If that fails, the only solution seems to be to add some minimal CSS to every one of out sent msgs. I tried to avoid that, I have special code to make the HTML we *send* out as minimal and the source readable as possible. One reason I why hate Outlook (even before my involvement in Mozilla) was the totally spammed and unreadable HTML they send out, and it got worse, not to the least due to the CSS. So, *if* we do this, this should occupy only exactly one line (in the <head>) in the HTML we send out.

Comment 10

[Peter Lairo]

We should consider making this "one line" of CSS also work with Lotus Notes (which is pretty bad as CSS) because there are many corporate users on Notes.

I agree with Ben that the extra (superfluous, in a standards world) code should be kept at a minimum.

Isn't there some standards way to indicate a quote in an HTML e-mail? (One that Outlook and notes would understand too?) That we use the nonstandard <blockquote type="cite"> "bugs" me to no end (bug 183219).

Comment 11

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

(In reply to comment #10)
> Isn't there some standards way to indicate a quote in an HTML e-mail? (One that
> Outlook and notes would understand too?)

No, there is not. That's the whole point of type=cite. If there was a standard, we'd use it.

Comment 12

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

sorry for the spam.  making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs.  filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.

Comment 13

[Jon B]

The QuoteAndComposeManager extension (formerly called RealBorders) is a workaround for this bug:

http://nic-nac-project.de/~kaosmos/realborders-en.html

I agree that this should be built into Thunderbird itself, though, with some basic style information included along with the message, since Outlook only renders them with indentation and no borders or anything, getting me complaints from recipients until I used the extension.

Comment 14

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter on "Nobody_NScomTLD_20080620"