851022 - Highlighting deep "reply to" indentations with colors

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, enhancement)

Description

[David Bourguignon]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:19.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/19.0
Build ID: 20130307023931

Steps to reproduce:

I replied to an email in plain text format, which contained a deep hierarchy of reply-tos (you know, the > and the >>, and the >>> in front of people answers)


Actual results:

It was difficult to read in plain text... And I love plain text emails! They are way lighter than HTML ones, and this is good for the bandwith, my harddrive, and therefore the Planet! :-)


Expected results:

Plain text emails already have automatic highlighting tricks, using * * for bold, _ _ for underlined, etc. What about color highlighting for reply-to indentations, such as > in red, >> in green, >>> in blue, etc. (a random pick in a 256 colormap should be sufficient)...

This would be good-looking (rainbows are good for the morale)... :-) Thanks in advance!

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

That was filed initially as bug 90315 for SeaMonkey a long time ago, but it's not a duplicate given that Thunderbird is a different application and could introduce this separately.

While not a built-in feature, there is an add-on for adding quote-depth colors, available from http://quotecolors.mozdev.org/ or https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/quote-colors/ (or, for experienced users, it can be achieved manually by a userContent.css style override).

Comment 2

[David Bourguignon]

Thanks rsx11m for the tip! I didn't know the Quote Colors add-on. However, it is apparently no longer supported by the most recent Thunderbird releases.

In fact, it seems that some of the Quote Colors functionalities (in particular, the colored vertical lines that are put parallel to each other in front of the quotes) have been integrated to Thunderbird main trunk. But what about text color highlighting? That would be a great next step, at least as an option.

Thanks again for your help, and have a good week-end!

Comment 3

[rsx11m]

Attachment: userContent.css style override

This code is what I've been using for quite a while now, taken from a forum post (I don't know the original source). It still works fine in 17.0.4, thus you can use this as a workaround for the time being.

See the post or http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserContent.css for instructions how and where to create the chrome folder and the userChrome.css file in it.

Adding the code to a Thunderbird style file to apply it by default should be feasible, but then it would apply to everyone, which may not be desired. The add-on provides more options to select and fine-tune the appearance of quoted content, porting that to the regular release version would be more effort.

I agree that it's a good feature to distinguish different quote levels in long chains of responses.

Comment 4

[David Bourguignon]

Thanks a lot rsx11m for the workaround!

Since there is already a color scheme used in Thunderbird 17 for highlighting reply levels (parallel lines drawn in shades of blue), how could we imagine building up onto it?

I feel we could apply the same shades of blue to the text itself, going from more recent (darker shades, thus more legible and emphasized text) to less recent (lighter shades, thus less legible and non emphasized text).

What do you think?

Comment 5

[rsx11m]

Attachment: userContent.css appearance

The levels 1 and 3 correspond to the quote-bar color already. Level 2 should be magenta, so that's a bit different. The orange color for the higher quoting levels wouldn't work well for the text. So, that code is some compromise to look fine but not to impair reading the text.

Comment 6

[David Bourguignon]

Agreed rsx11m. The color scheme looks good to me, except the discrepancy between the quote-bar color and the text color for levels 4 to 6.

Aside from this, what about switching to something visually more striking, such as a rainbow gradation of colors? (Saturated/Darkish colors such as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet should be easy to read, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow)

Thanks in advance!

Comment 7

[rsx11m]

You are welcome. You can play with the colors in the userContent.css code to see what fits best for you. Yellow and orange likely won't work for the text unless the background is made darker for the 4th to 6th quoting level.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/color_value

As for making this part of the general code, again, it would be a matter of being able to switch the effect on and off, which cannot be done by such static rules.

Comment 8

[:aceman]

Bwinton, can't we make this built-in? Could also be controlled via a pref in settings -> display.

Comment 9

[Blake Winton (:bwinton) (:☕️)]

Levels 5 and 6 look a little too low-contrast to me.  And level 3 is almost too low-contrast.  But yeah, I would be up for making this built-in.  How do you think it would interact with people who set the text colour explicitly?

Comment 10

[:aceman]

It could be turned off via a pref? I imagine putting this into a separate css file, that is not included (or disabled) in the message reader code if the pref is off.

The colors are up for discussion and the css would be shipped by the theme.

Comment 11

[David Bourguignon]

Dear rsx11m, aceman, bwinton, thanks for your feedback! Here are my two cents on how I would see this feature:

(1) It should be a simple on/off control in the email display prefs.

(2) The color scheme should be part of the overall Thunderbird theme (tweakable for experts, but not through the general prefs).

(3) The default color scheme should match with Thunderbird current theme (I don't know its guidelines, but it seems that the style of the advanced search results, with blue histograms, etc., gives a good idea of it).

(4) IMHO the current Thunderbird design guidelines are not followed by the previous color proposal (see attachment 725964 [details]).

Thanks in advance!

Comment 12

[rsx11m]

(In reply to Blake Winton (:bwinton) from comment #9)
> Levels 5 and 6 look a little too low-contrast to me.  And level 3 is almost
> too low-contrast.

Sure, that may not be the optimal color scheme, it's what I found in the forum post and should be easy to change to something that's more suitable for all cases.

(In reply to :aceman from comment #10)
> I imagine putting this into a separate css file, that is not included (or
> disabled) in the message reader code if the pref is off.

Sounds like an interesting alternative to the more conventional way of using some attribute that's needed to trigger the respective (otherwise static) CSS rule.

Comment 13

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

See bug 90315 comment 14 and comment 30

Comment 14

[rsx11m]

See bug 90315 comment #14, we need separate solutions for each application.
This bug should cover Thunderbird's solution, the other SeaMonkey's.

Unduping again.

Comment 15

[rsx11m]

(In reply to rsx11m from comment #14)
I meant to refer to my bug 90315 comment #44, of course.

Comment 19

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

> we need separate solutions for each application.

No, we don't. Why would we?

Comment 20

[rsx11m]

Different style sheets, etc.? The quote bars are already different between applications, e.g., SeaMonkey has gray ones on a single side and Thunderbird colored ones on both sides.

Comment 21

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

There is no reason why they should be different, unless Thunderbird users and Seamonkey users prefer different colors or similar, which I doubt. Having the same implementation has obvious benefits.

Comment 22

[rsx11m]

There are many things different in the Message Viewer UI implementations between Thunderbird and SeaMonkey by now, and the gap has been rather growing over the years with Thunderbird going new ways in the UX. I don't know if there are difference in opinions about the color scheme among the users of both applications, but history tells us there may.

Anyway, as said, any necessary MailNews Core backend development can be done in bug 90315 to create the common prerequisites, then each application can decide on its own which actual color schemes go best with the respective default themes.