480599 - Improve extensibility of message header pane

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1530122

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, defect)

Description

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Lightly edited transcript from an IRC conversation:

<davida> i don't know how we can solve the fact that the header pane is mostly useful thanks to XBL bindings, but addons can't overlay xbl bindings.  that's a real problem.

<dmose> https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XBL/XBL_1.0_Reference/Anonymous_Content seems relevant here

<asuth> simplest thing is probably to define a standard event that gets fired, along the lines of that contentgenerated event thing
<asuth> if you write an extension, listen on this event, and we will give you the DOM node and its anonymous tree as arguments
<asuth> go to town performing fix-ups and transforms

Comment 1

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

The text at <https://developer.mozilla.org/en/XBL/XBL_1.0_Reference/Binding_Attachment_and_Detachment#Binding_Documents> makes me wonder if the existence of document.loadingBindingDocument means that the overlay problem doesn't actually need to be solved.  I need to do some more reading and playing around.

David, do you recall having any particular use cases in mind when this was brought up?

Comment 2

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

dmose, can you elaborate?  It sounds like you are proposing that extensions would mutate the binding template to inject themselves.

I will provide candidate use-cases for discussion purposes:
1) Annotating each e-mail address with the person's picture.
2) Annotating each e-mail address with a sparkline of messages sent by that person over the past year.
3) Annotating each subject with a thread-arc type visualization of the conversation in the vicinity of the message in the conversation.

That gives us two extensions that might combat each other and one that is by its lonesome.

Comment 3

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

We'd very much like to see this, but we wouldn't allow it to block Thunderbird 3 from shipping if it were the last bug standing.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

for version 3.1?

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

I'm taking it from dmose's comment that this wouldn't block 3.1 at this point either - dmose, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

liberally reassigning, and cc blake. 
What is relative importance of header pane to other UI wants/needs?
And should this be included in UXprio, or some other list?

Comment 7

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

I think at this stage we'd certainly welcome contributions, I wouldn't put it above the other things we're working on at the moment though.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

This is rather a mashup of suggestions - do we have another bug to cover this/should it be split in to multiple bugs?

Comment 9

[John Bieling (:TbSync)]

There is an API request for this, doing it the "new" way as a WebExtension API in Bug 1530122.

We can either wontfix this here, as the technology changed and it will have to be implemented differently or we can mark as a dupe, as the idea of this bug is the same as in the referenced Bug 1530122.

Comment 10

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Let's dupe.