Re: [Nmh-workers] semantics of mhshow -type and -part

[David Levine]

Paul F. wrote:

> david wrote:
>  > Paul F. wrote:
>  >
>  > > as an aside, i actually think "the sender's ranking" is a
>  > > highly overrated, and possibly even obsolete concept these
>  > > days, RFCs notwithstanding.
>  >
>  > I'm not sure about that.  My phone seems to handle it
>  > (multipart/alternative) nicely.
>
> and nmh does (or could) too, right now, if we were all willing to
> hand html mail to our browsers for display.  but most of would
> prefer to see text/plain over text/html,

mhn.defaults, by default, prefers text/html over text/plain.
You know that you can override that, right?

> or perhaps even choose which based on sender.

That's messier with mhn.defaults and/or the profile, but still
doable.

> i'd like to see that made easier than it is
> now, because while its nice to know what the "sender" would prefer
> me to look at, that preference can be difficult for me to
> accomodate.
>
>  >
>  > On the other hand, I have been getting emails with text/html and
>  > text/plain in a multipart/related.  But those two text parts
>  > appear to be just different representations of the same content,
>  > so they really should be in a multipart/alternative.  I had been
>  > thinking that these are mistakes.  But now I wonder if that's the
>  > sender's way of punting the choice to the recipient.
>
> does it matter?  again, this suggests that we need better mechanisms
> for choosing among alternative mime parts in ways that are somewhat
> independent of the sender's supposed preference.

In this case, the sender isn't indicating a preference.  So mhshow
shows all the alternatives.  I find that annoying, but at least
it's easy to avoid.

David