[Coco] NB Torsten. Re: Was: To Dennis: Message formatting issues with Mailman Archiver

Thu May 29 20:33:37 EDT 2014

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz <dennis-ix at ...> writes:

> From: pairList Support
> 
> Hello Dennis,
> 
> The archives for the coco pairList now have the viewport meta tag in them
> set to be device-width.  Please let us know if this helps with line wraps
> on Windows phones.
> 
> Best regards,
> Sean P.
> pair Networks, Inc.

Hi Dennis,

thanks for providing that feedback.

However, despite I didn't any notice any change in archive messages' HTML 
source code (I would have expected something like <meta name="viewport" 
content="width=device-width">) and I don't notice any difference in 
behaviour in any of the outdated IE (neither on the desktop PC nor on the 
phone), I doubt that would really solve the issue.

I still think the problem is that either the default values in the source 
code have changed from:

class HyperArchive(pipermail.T): 
# [...]
# some defaults 
# [...]   
ALLOWHTML = 0             # "Lines between <html></html>" handled as is. 
SHOWHTML = 1              # Eg, nuke leading whitespace in html manner. 
IQUOTES = 1               # Italicize quoted text. 
SHOWBR = 1                # Add <br> onto every line 

to something containing SHOWHTML = 0, or they changed this archiver 
setting by configuration (didn't find a hint in the mailman docs that this 
is possible).

As soon as SHOWHTML == 0, the <PRE> tags are used for message display:

def format_article(self, article):
# [...]
if not self.SHOWHTML and lines: 
              lines.insert(0, '<PRE>') 
              lines.append('</PRE>') 
# [...]

The style of <PRE> is then defined via CSS setting:

<style type="text/css">
       pre {
           white-space: pre-wrap;  /* css-2.1, curent FF, Opera, Safari */
           }
</style>

The "pre-wrap" value for the "white-space" property ("Whitespace is 
preserved by the browser. Text will wrap when necessary, and on line 
breaks.") was introduced with CSS 2.1, which is not supported by IE at 
least until IE8 and at least by outdated windows phone browsers (don't 
have the chance to test with a new one).

Maybe you can foward this info to the pairlist support team (just because 
they were polite enough to ask for a feedback). Nevertheless, I think what 
I need to do is buy a smarter device than the crappy one I have.

Best regards and thanks again for taking care about this list,
Torsten