Re: Citation processing in HTML articles?

[Dave Abrahams]

on Thu May 19 2016, Emanuel Berg <embe8573-AT-student.uu.se> wrote:

> Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> writes:
>
>> I can write a citation-coloring-and-hiding
>> postprocessor for Gnus myself if I have to
>> but I was hoping someone already solved
>> this problem.
>
> Isn't this achieved with:
>
>     (setq gnus-treat-hide-citation t)
>
> and then setting the faces:
>
>     gnus-cite-1
>     gnus-cite-2
>     gnus-cite-...
>     gnus-cite-attribution
>
> ?
>
>> No, I just don't want to have to go through
>> the process of hunting for the right
>> combination of mime buttons and article
>> washing necessary to make an article
>> readable.
>
> Gnus can to a certain extent make crappy
> messages look good. But if the messages are
> good to begin with, they'll look good in Gnus
> with no intervention to it.
>
> The hiding of citations, and replacing them
> with button so they can be expanded if need be,
> this is not washing but a convenient way of
> getting less text to bother you, while still
> have it readily available.
>
>> There are lots of reasons not to use a more
>> “traditional” mail client than Gnus, but at
>> least they tend to make more of the messages
>> quite readable without user intervention.
>
> Can you provide us with examples of messages
> that Gnus makes less readable? I don't think
> Gnus does that - more likely *the messages* are
> crappy beyond help to begin with, and with
> efforts Gnus can be made to make them look
> somewhat better.

That's not my experience.  If you read through the messages in
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.swift.evolution you'll see quite a
variety, and usually at least *one* way of looking at the message will
be pretty good, and furthermore usually a GUI client like Thunderbird
will do an excellent job at rendering it.  The most common problem I've
seen is that many messages with embedded code examples in HTML have the
code terribly misformatted in their plain text MIME segments.  So I have
to look at the HTML if I want to read the code.  However, I can't get
the overlong citations to be hidden, so it takes too long to figure out
which non-code I need to look at.

>> And I don't show the MIME buttons by
>> default, FWIW.
>
> Which are those? The attachment buttons?
> Why would you want to hide them?

I'm trying to eliminate visual clutter.  The more I can do that and have
Gnus get things right automatically, the better my life is.

-- 
-Dave