Re: macho 0.4 released

On Sun, Nov 09, 2003 at 09:53:00AM -0800, Miles Egan wrote:
>     * added thread context view in message view

The thread view is *very* nice and extremely useful. 

> I'd appreciate any feedback on the hotkey thread navigation especially.

The hotkeys didn't work directly in Mozilla Firebird, but since it does
type-ahead matching for links that works almost as well - i.e. press <J>
and <Enter> to go to the next one.

I'm not convinced that chronological [Prev] and [Next] buttons make much
sense though in a threaded view - I was at first confused by the way they
seem to jump randomly through the archive.

My suggestion would be something similar to the way slrn and other
newsreader handle threaded views - get rid of chronological [Prev] and
[Next] and use the thread-prev and thread-next by default, but add some
tree-based navigation options:

	[prev thread] skip back to the previous toplevel article.

	[next thread] skip ahead to the next toplevel article.

	[parent] select this article's parent (it would be really nice if
		that would work even if the parent is in last month's
		archive)

	[skip subthread] skip ahead to the next article that isn't in
		reply to (in the subtee below) this one, i.e. to skip
		discussions that went off on a tangent.

I've got a couple of ideas that would require some statefulness (this
could be client-side using cookies, or server-based), to make the
interface smarter by keeping track of read articles, preferences and so
on. Would you be interested in going in that direction? The web message
boards I've seen are mostly rather braindead, and I'd love to have
something smarter available. I'm not sure if I'll have time to hack on
this though, so many cool projects and so little time :-(

-Klaus