68982 - featurectomy - saving messages as html

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: MIME, defect)

Description

[John G. Myers]

Removing all the special-case code for saving messages as HTML files.

The usefulness of this feature is outweighed by its complexity and the fact that 
its i18n aspects are broken.

Comment 1

[John G. Myers]

Attachment: Patch

Comment 2

[John G. Myers]

ducarroz - please review

Comment 3

[John G. Myers]

Patch also removes some unreferenced properties.  Also, on linux the file picker
had *.eml listed twice "Mail Files (*.eml) (*.eml)"

Comment 4

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Suggest WONTFIX.

This is a useful feature. If it's broken or written badly, then fix it or leave
it. But don't remove functionality just because you dislike some |if| statements.

If you look at the patch, you save only a few lines. Most of them are in the one
if statement around the conversion in the text converters it's the hack for bug
50413. But: WHy did we take the time to fix that bug (for JPN only) at all, if
we now remove that functinality altogether?

In no case remove the plainHTML mode of the text converters.

Comment 5

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Note: This is also currently discussed on .mail-news, in thread "Saving messages
as html" <news://news.mozilla.org/[e-mail]>.

Comment 6

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

John, please hold on this patch. I am still analyzing the whole mime and at this
stage it would be to early to start cutting down like that in mime. My personal
dream is to rewrite mime using reall C++ architecture and using Unicode as
standart api format but we have too way much other stuff more important to do...

Comment 7

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

John, this is the only (non-plaintext) mode that outputs the whole msg in a
format that is understood by non-Gecko renderes. If you remove this mode,
Mailnews will suddenly depend on full Gecko. That's too high a price for these
few lines of code.

Comment 8

[John G. Myers]

This is a policy issue.  Assigning to module owner.

Comment 9

[David Ascher (:davida)]

bienvenu, is this feature even in trunk at this stage or can we close this bug?

Comment 10

[David :Bienvenu]

this feature is still there - select a message, do a file | save as file, and then change the type to .html, and we'll create an html file. I've found this handy in the past, so I wouldn't personally vote for removing it - it doesn't seem like a big enough win in the code cleanup department.

Comment 11

[David Ascher (:davida)]

Wow, that's what I call an undiscoverable feature.  I don't know of any other program that changes the format of the file written based on how people tweak the save file dialog entry.

I suspect no one who didn't look at the code or troll through bugzilla knows about it. 

If we're going to keep it, I think we should think about whether there's a better UI for it.  

Comment 12

[David :Bienvenu]

Firefox behaves the same way :-)

Comment 13

[David :Bienvenu]

As does IE - I agree it's not very user friendly but it seems relatively standard on Windows.

Comment 14

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Searching for news://news.mozilla.org/[e-mail] using advanced search on Google Groups doesn't show anything.  What are the use cases for this feature, anyway?

Comment 15

[David Ascher (:davida)]

I take it back.  i hadn't noticed the file format popup.