Re: [Nmh-workers] (no subject)

[David Levine]

Ken wrote:

> Looking back at the original thread ... it seems like I misunderstood you.
> When you said, "mhlist is a counterexample", I thought you meant that was
> an example of another program that showed the parts reversed (other than
> mhstore).

Right.  You said:

# Meh.  Everywhere else nmh presents MIME parts in the order in
# which they occur in the message;

mhlist does not.  (The discussion was about what goes on
internally, not about mhlist.)

> My point was that for any other MIME content, the part ordering is based
> on the sequence in the original message.  multipart/alternative is the
> exception.

multipart/alternative IS different than any other content.  The
question is how mhlist/mhstore should present the part ordering
to the user.  It makes sense to me to list the most preferred
part first as part 1, the next second as part 2, and so on.

The parts are stored in reverse order in the message to make
them easier to view with non-MIME-conformant viewers.  That is
irrelevant to a user of mhlist/mhstore.  Why expose it?

> We don't reorder multipart/mixed so that text content is
> first and image content is after that, for example.

Because we shouldn't reorder them.

Now that you bring up multipart/mixed:  mhshow and mhlist
display and list, respectively, the parts of multipart/mixed in
the same order.  mhshow and mhlist also (attempt to) display and
list, respectively, the parts of multipart/alternative in the
same order.  This is just another way of looking at why I think
it would be wrong to change mhlist.  We'd have inconsistent
behavior.

> I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that;

That's fine.  But please don't change the default behavior.

David