35930 - Scroll to non-quoted text

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: MIME, enhancement)

Description

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Add the following preference:
When a message is displayed, the viewable area should start, where the first
non-quoted text starts, i.e. "skip quotes", if the msg doesn't fit into the
viewable area.

Proposed fix:
1. In
  a. mimetpla.cpp,
  b. mimetpfl.cpp and
  c. the HTML MIME stream converter,
add a named anchor, e.g. "<a name="txt_newtext"></a>", when the quote level
reaches 0.
2. In the frontend, load the msg URL with the anchor appended, e.g.
<url://to-msg#newtext>.

I can at least implement 1a.

Comment 1

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

*** Bug 52272 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

I would also like a shortcut for this. See bug #52272.

Comment 3

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

FYI: The (absolutely great!) newsreader XNews uses the keyboard shortcut 
Shift+Space for this.

Comment 4

[John Moreno]

it wouldn't be a preference, but you could do approximately what xnews does by 

using a fixed search string (i.e. treat shift-space as search for /\n[^>]/).

Comment 5

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Changing personal priorities. Giving away most of my bugs :-( (reassigning to
default owner).

I will still track these bugs closely. If you need my input, feel free to ask me.

New owner: Please do *not* close these bugs (as WONTFIX or whatever you may
find) unless they are fixed. Rather, reassign to <[e-mail]>, if you
don't want to work on them.

Comment 6

[scottputterman]

reassigning to ducarroz

Comment 7

[Peter Lairo]

This feature could *greatly* enhance (i.e. revolutionize) mail/news reading.
This bug has been sitting dead in the water for 6 months, please don't forget
about it ;)

Comment 8

[Peter Lairo]

*** Bug 90391 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Peter Lairo]

Copying part of description from duped bug because it expresses why this bug is
so relevant:

> One topic of great discussion is whether top or bottom posting is better. Also
whether to allow the sig to be immediately below the top posted response. 

> Many persons like to post responses to mails and newsthreads above the quoted
text because it is quicker to read when opening messages (you don't have to
scroll to the bottom). However, this causes a great deal of confusion when some
people post replies on the bottom and other on the top.

> The advantage of top posting (quick access to the newest info) could be
completely eliminated if Mozilla had a pref to automatically jump to the
non-quoted portion (i.e. the new post) of the message. This would be soooo cool.

> It might be quite difficult to do this well because posts with many replies
might have a lot of funky formatting (e.g., setions that "look" like the newest
response, but are not).

Comment 10

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

Accepting

Comment 11

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Attaching a patch to implement this.  The patch does the following:
* Changes the plain-text and flowed-text mime converters to detect the first 
block of new text, and create an anchor.  The HTML and other mime converters 
haven't been done yet, but this still works for the vast majority of usenet 
posts.

* The mail window attaches a web-progress listener to the docShell that 
contains the message text.  When the docShell notifies that the load is 
complete, we search through all anchors in our document, and if we find our 
special name, we scroll to it.

* This is all controlled via the new boolean 
preference "mailnews.display.scroll_to_first_new_text".  To see the behaviour 
in action, you need to set this to |true| in your user.js.  There was no 
attempt to add this option to the UI yet.

I like this, and it works well.  Any comments?

Comment 12

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Attachment: Proposed patch, as discussed.

Comment 13

[Peter Lairo]

Many messages have "so-and-so wrote:" at the top of the message, which is *not*
quoted. Will your fix think this is the beginning of non-quoted portion and stop
there, instead of finding the real unquoted text further down?

Comment 14

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

If there are 3 or less lines of unquoted text at the top, we don't count that as
new text.

It can still get thrown though - eg, by someone top-posting a single line, and
previous quotes having wrapped to look like new text - we then scroll to a
wrapped quote.  But even in those strange cases, scrolling back to find the real
content is a minor nuisance, and doesn't detract from the general usefulness of
the behaviour (IMO, of course ;)

If it wasn't for wrapped quotes, this would work perfectly in almost every case :)

Comment 15

[John Moreno]

This is a feature that was added to Thoth (mac newsreader) at my 
request, and during beta testing badly wrapped text was (of course) one of 
the problems.  If memory serves, it was solved by requiring at least 2 
contiguous lines of unquoted text.

Comment 16

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Attachment: Better patch

Better patch that always works :)  The frames(0) construct was failng to work
in some situations (notably, in a process with a hidden "-turbo" window
running).  Also tweaked the status handler to only check the preference value
when we actually care about the state.

Comment 17

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Attachment: Patch that skips most wrapped quotes.

Comment 18

[John Moreno]

If I understand this patch correctly, it automatically scrolls to the first 
unquoted line.  Any chance that it could be modified so that you can scroll 
to the next unquoted line from wherever you currently are?  Or should that 
be reported as a separate RFE bug?

Comment 19

[Håkan Waara]

Just use the scrollbar at the right-hand side of your pane. Let's not make this
feature an overkill (IMO).

Comment 20

[John Moreno]

It's not overly complicated -- most mail/news programs allow you to page 
through a message via the space key.  The programs that I know of that 
have implemented this feature, have done so by overriding the space key, 
so that if you hold down the shift key when hitting the space key, instead of 
scrolling one page, it scrolls to the next unquoted line.

Comment 21

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

The "scroll to next text" feature would be nice, but I would prefer not to
pollute this bug with it.  How about we let this bug go as it is, which at least
lets us get our foot in the door.  We can then use a new bug for this kind of
feature request.

Comment 22

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Attachment: Bring patch up to date

nsIWebProgress.addProgressListener() grew a new param ;)

Comment 23

[Esben Mose Hansen]

This patch has been sitting idle for 4 months now. Any chance of a review?

Comment 24

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Idle for over a year now, and still working fine for me :)  Any ideas who I can
request a review from?

Comment 25

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

ducarroz would be the right one to review. Or me, but I am too lazy :-/.

Did you consider to implement it all in the JS frontend, without touching
libmime at all? It would then work for HTML etc. as well, and wouldn't pollute
the plaintext classes with further fancy stuff (it's quite a lot of code for
such a feature), but then again maybe it's best to keep all the fancy stuff in
one place.  I'm not sure what's the best approach.

Comment 26

[zug_treno]

*** Bug 330048 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***