[Adium-devl] [kopete-devel] Kopete Message styles and Adium

[David Smith]

Some thoughts I've had on message view issues:

1) Google groups is nice; we should set up one for this.

2) There is currently no way to refer to any particular element of a  
chat in the webview. A custom template.html can override the outer  
structure, and the various Content.html files can specify any  
arbitrary html they want for messages. This makes any sort of  
advanced manipulation of the DOM impossible.

3) Some of the Kopete extensions are, imo, taking the customizability  
a bit too far. We also need a centralized way of documenting  
extensions (I suggest posts to the google group).

4) Kopete currently doesn't support message style versioning, due to  
not reading Info.plist. This could cause problems.

5) It turns out that saving images to a temporary folder and  
specifying them as the src to images is not as nasty as it seems. It  
allows for the images to be opened in other apps/dragged to the  
desktop, and the webkit cache can't have items "locked" into it, so  
we would still need to write the file out to repopulate the cache  
when needed even if we directly loaded images into the webview from  
memory.

6) Although CSS and JS allow for quite complex manipulations of the  
message structure, doing so is significantly less commonly understood  
than editing the html.

7) People find the message view code scary, and don't really  
understand how it works. I need to write some docs describing its  
structure, 'cause it's really not that bad.

8) Good copy and paste is hard. That sucks, and we should figure out  
what to do about it.

9) Searchability is coming in webkit. With any luck they won't leave  
it 10.5-only.

Ideas:

Introduce a new mostly-compatible version, as we have done in the  
past, with the following changes:

1) All message elements are wrapped in <div class="message"  
id="message: 1" style="margin:0px; padding:0px;"></div> (where 1 is  
replaced by some integer representing the index of the message)
	This will let us refer to messages directly so that we can do things  
like removing, reordering, or modifying messages after they're in the  
view. Possibly we should look into attaching classes/ids to other  
elements as well so that (for example) we could set %message% to be  
<img src="loading.gif" id="messagecontent: 5">, and then once it was  
done loading we could swap in the newly loaded content. I'm a little  
unsure on how exactly this should be structured, so I welcome comments.
	The style on the div is designed to minimize the layout impact of  
it. In the ideal case, current styles should be upgradable without  
even being aware that their messages are being wrapped, but this may  
not be feasible.

2) Use classes more effectively. We could perfectly easily just add  
class="history" instead of using AIContentContext. Same goes for  
actions.

3 [implementation detail. Kopete folks feel free to ignore this one])  
We can probably keep an invisible DOM node of the content template  
ready and waiting to go, then just do .cloneNode() on it, set the  
content, and insert it. The downside of this is that we lose custom  
js behaviors like Renkoo... so some way of accommodating them could  
be in order.

4) Optional files works surprisingly well. I don't think most people  
have even *noticed* that they can provide FileTransfer.html yet. It  
Just Works®, and if they need the customizability it's there. We  
could literally make every html file in the message view optional.  
Styles that felt like going all CSS on it could just style a *well  
documented* standard message html. I don't know if this is a good idea.

  											David Smith