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On 06/21/2011 01:18 PM, Joshua Cranmer wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4E00FC8B.5050701@verizon.net" type="cite">1.
The codebase realizes it needs to open up an editor<br>
2. The window is created (or reused, yuck) and fully initialized.<br>
2.5 Initial message contents and parameters are set.<br>
3. The user (un)happily edits their message via the UI--most code
here is fairly contained within the editor<br>
4. The editor's contents become serialized into the message
envelope<br>
5. The code sends the message envelope<br>
<br>
(...)<br>
<br>
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But, at the very least, I think we need a sense of what we want
the compose code to look like in Thunderbird ∞, so we can produce
a roadmap and start implementing it. It sounds like this is what
you're volunteering to help do?</blockquote>
Your understanding of the situation is pretty good. I don't want to
push this experiment further because I'm going the hacky route and
this will soon be untenable for me. I just wanted to show a
proof-of-concept. The main conclusions I have reached are:<br>
- it is easy, and feasible, to rewrite the composition steps 2, 2.5,
and 3 using JS and an external UI for the editor,<br>
- CKeditor doesn't seem to fit that well, we'd probably need to
write our own, to refresh the old one, or find another one better
suited for the task,<br>
- there's a lot of complexity, but if we agree on a minimal subset
of features that we need to have, and progressively clean up the
code, it will be feasible to offer a replacement (assuming we solve
the previous point). As David said, removing the [noscript]s is
actually feasible, and we'd be able to replace nsMsgCompose.cpp
piecewise. It's just that I didn't want to start hacking Thunderbird
without further reflecting in the issue.<br>
<br>
What I need is:<br>
- commitment towards this direction: "yes, this is something we need
to do, let's have more people working on it", otherwise I don't feel
like carrying the rewrite on my own, I don't have a broad enough set
of skills (I'm bad at UI and UX, for instance), and this is too much
work for a single person;<br>
- a solution for the editor UI issue. Both rkent and ehsan made good
points, rkent saying that "yes we have limited resources, so relying
on an external editor might relieve the burden for us" (rephrasing
here), and ehsan saying (rightly) that ckeditor might bring more
problems than it solves.<br>
<br>
Assuming we find a way to solve both problems above, I would
certainly do my best to see this happen.<br>
<br>
Thanks to everyone for the insights,<br>
<br>
jonathan<br>
<br>
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