Re: macho 0.4 released

On Mon, Nov 10, 2003 at 09:00:22AM -0800, Miles Egan wrote:
> Shift-J should work, but, like I said in my last message, it's clear
> that this isn't obvious enough. 

How about using lowercase letters for the hotkeys? I tested that by
changing the javascript manually, and it works fine in Mozilla Firebird.
It's easier to document and to type :-)

> I had a couple of goals for Macho when I started that I'd like to
> maintain:
> 
> 1. Should be very simple to install.
> 2. Shouldn't require any external software to do its job.
> 3. Should generate static archives that could be saved and browsed
> indefinitely without Macho.

I agree with those goals - I wasn't even aware at first that the mail
archives consisted of completely static pages, the illusion of
interactivity works extremely well.

It may be interesting to add optional additional features that would only
be available if Macho runs as a dynamic web server application, but
that's definitely in the "nice to have" category.

I've just recently started with project that I'm implementing as a CL
web-server app. It may turn out that I'll be able to use Macho as a
component, in which case I'll look into any extensions at that time. Due
to chronic lack of time, I won't make any promises though when or if
that'll happen.

One other suggestion - some people are inconsiderate enough to have names
that can't be expressed in 7-bit ascii, i.e.:

	=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Fr=E9d=E9ric_Brunel?=

That looks rather ugly in the index - how about creating the output page
in an 8-bit charset (or Unicode, but that would be more work unless you
can use an existing conversion library), and undoing the
quoted-unreadable encoding?

If you want a more correct non-Unicode solution, the program could make a
list of all the charsets used the page and then use the most common one
for the output encoding (declared using a http-equiv meta header in the
HTML file), leaving the remaining ones unexpanded, so it would work
unchanged for mailing lists that consistently use a different code page.
But I personally would be happy with just ISO-8859-1 :-)

-Klaus