[BUGS] Toy GUIs (was: format=flawed (was: Why is my mail being horribly newlined?))

[Andrew Reilly]

Hi Greg,

Sorry for coming on a bit strong in that previous message.  I was
mostly just yanking your chain, because I know (or believe that I
know) most of your strongly-held opinions about mail and text.  I
actually agree with most of them, but, perhaps because my daytime
work is within a Microsoft-powered (encumbered?) business, perhaps
because all of my extended family have e-mail, and most of them
are non-techo Microsoft or Apple users who generally send HTML
mail, I'm doing my best to adapt myself and my tools to suit.  I
do a large chunk of my work in e-mail, so I am also passionate
about it, and also somewhat unhappy about the state of the
tools...

On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 10:34:43 +1100
Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> > You probably hate that Web pages render according to the
> > viewer's preferences, too.  It comes down to the same thing:
> > 80-column text windows are inappropriate models for a typeset,
> > arbitrary-sized display window,  
> 
> Strongly disagreed.  Why should the text be reformatted to fit the
> size of and arbitrary-sized display window?  The arbitrary size is
> either something in the mind of the window manager programmer (and
> thus usually too small), or it's full screen (almost invariably too
> large, but usually mitigated by the arbitrary subdivision of the
> screen into panes).

Two comments about this: 1) You clearly don't care enough about it
to set a WIDTH tag (or whatever it is in HTML) in the text at the
link that you included, below.  If it's not important enough for
world-wide publication, why should it be more-so for personal or
group communication? 2) most of my colleagues at work, who use
the latest version of Outlook, have it set to display the usual
three panes as three vertical columns, so the text-body-viewing
pane is actually a reasonable width for reading paragraphs of
text.  At last!  I've noticed that claws-mail can work that way
too, and that's the way I have it set up.  Works quite nicely.

> > which is what the market (for text production and viewing systems)
> > has clearly selected, nearly universally.  
> 
> This is true, for some definition of "select"--they've had it foisted
> on them, and so far they haven't resisted.  But it won't last.

Sure it will.  What will probably change, though, is that the
text renderers will start to default to displaying paragraphs of
a reasonable width, either by changing the window size, as
described above, or by defaulting to include some sort of HTML
tag to specify a preferred reading width that corresponds to the
width of the composition window, or some sane aesthetic.

The
punters
clearly
can't
figure
that
out
for themselves
[just for argument's sake, I've left that just as the claws-mail
composition window created it, as it wrapped words off the end of
the paragraph above.  Now *that's* vastly more broken than
Mail.app generally manages to be...]

>  It's
> an indication of the immaturity of the industry.  It ignores such
> basics as the human eye.  There's a reason why books are typeset the
> way they are: the eye can read approximately 70-80 characters well,
> and anything wider than that requires too much eye movement.

Sure.  But people in windowing environments seem to (a) prefer
variable-pitch fonts, (probably because that's what they see most
often in print, and (b) hate any of the alternatives that
happen with plain text: either they have to scroll from side to
side, or see unevenly-wrapped lines (as started this thread), or
they see great gobbing regions of white-space on the right.  You
and I could probably agree that the best result was a display
window that automatically (or simply by default) set itself to a
reasonable width to suit paragraph text.  I don't know why it's
taken the GUI industry so long to get anywhere near that.

> The real thing is that it's *difficult* to read over-long lines.

Yes, true, but with fully-flowed paragraphs, that's something
that the viewer is at liberty to fix.  I reduced the size of my
web browser to about 18cm wide to read your web page, for
example.  I do that sort of thing all the time, although I'd
prefer it if the text somehow managed a reasonable width by
default.

>  And
> many MUAs break more complicated layout almost beyond belief.

Yes.  I wish they'd just copy fmt or emacs' fill-paragraph
algorithms and be done with it.

It could be argued (and I'm sure that it has been) that "more
complicated layout" is not the job of plain ASCII text, and that
the *correct* answer is to move to RTF or HTML, where at least
bullet points and paragraphs have some real significance.  I find
nicely-bullet-pointed ASCII text pretty easy to read and write,
myself, if I can use vi, but it's hard, otherwise.

> > It matters for some things, like program coding, but for
> > english text it hardly matters at all.  
> 
> Not if you don't want to read it.
> 
> Have you noticed how frustrating a typical mail exchange with people
> using Microsoft or Apple MUAs is?  I'm noticing more and more that
> people don't seem to read their mail.  I'm sure it's not because mine
> is correctly formatted; obscenities like Microsoft "Outlook" take out
> the formatting anyway, and do it their way.  More and more I'm
> receiving replies which don't address the issues I've raised?  See
> http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-dec2007.html#6 for a recent example.
> It happens so often that I can't recall when I got a proper reply from
> anybody in the Microsoft space.  I'm sure it's related to the
> difficulty of use of the "tools".

I'm pretty sure that this is just an issue of "people", rather
than "tools" so much.  It's perfectly possible to respond
appropriately to text e-mail with Mail.app.  It's less easy with
Outlook, I'll grant you.  Mostly though, people just don't seem to
care to do it right.  Even fairly technical people.

> > Sure, it's not much work to have nicely-formatted plain-text
> > paragraphs in vi or emacs, but Mail.app doesn't give you access to
> > either of those.  (and neither does Outlook, Thunderbird, Evolution,
> > or whatever everyone uses these days.)  
> 
> Which shows what absolute poverty these toys have reached.  If there's
> one central thing you want to be able to do with a computer, it's
> manipulate text.  Anything that deliberately makes that more difficult
> is just plain broken.

Yeah.  I don't know why no-one has managed to really get it
right, yet.

> > Despite several deficiencies, I reckon that Mail.app is best GUI
> > e-mail program available, for most non-list uses.  
> 
> If it's the best, how bad are the rest?

Very, very bad indeed.  Unusable, in my opinion, but not always
for the same reasons.

> mutt is definitely showing its age, and it could be improved to do
> some of these things.  I wish people would direct their attention to
> making good software instead of brightly coloured toys.

I think that the best avenues for advancement on that front are
not going to come from adding GUI things to mutt, but from
knocking the rough edges off claws-mail and Mail.app.  There
really aren't all that many of them.  It's not something that I
have time to do myself, though.  Just enough time to complain
about it... :-)

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew