On Thursday, September 21, 2000, 10:24:03 AM, Oliver wrote:
> Hi Ming-Li,
> I know neither Agent's nor XNews's way of doing things, and
> I'm in fact quite satisfied with TB's way of visualising
> threading (the threading itself is not so good).
Again, I can't talk about XNews since my memory has faded. Agent
does this and it's quite clever, at least to me:
Subject Author Date
This is a thread John 9/23/00
Mary
Joe
Jackson
Oliver
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
nobody
somebody
This is another thread Linda 9/23/00
.....
I hope that's clear enough (Note that I omitted other irrelevant
columns). Because the subject line is shown only once per thread, it
separate threads visually with ease. It then use the combined space
of the Subject and Author columns to show authors only, giving it
enough room to indent the information and present the hierarchical
relationship between them. The user may decide the width and the
maximum layers of indentation.
It has its downside, however. Whenever there's a long thread, which
isn't unusual in newsgroups, the subject line is missing from the
message list window. You'll have to look it up in the message header
pane.
Second, the order of the columns can't be adjusted, for Agent needs
the subject column and the author column to be held together.
Third, you can only collapse/expand the whole thread, not part of
it.
Except the second one, I guess none of these can't be overcome. As I
said, however, Agent's development has been all but abandoned. Pity.
> The only thing is, I don't understand where the idea comes
> from to destroy my screen layout when I read some message, be it
> at the top or the bottom of a thread. So, the visual
> representation would be fine for me if the column simply kept
> it's size (which, to repeat myself, I can set manually by the
> pixel). I have a 1280 screen width and my first column is really
> wide, to view even long subjects and also those on a deeper
> threading level. But it shouldn't be resizing all the time!
It's a little more complicated than that. Because the column order
is adjustable by the user, the first column isn't necessarily the
Subject column. Take "Message Flag" for example, which is TB's
default and also the first column of my personalized settings.
Without expanding the width of the column automatically, it would
soon run out of space. And I certainly don't want to fix the width
of the Message Flag column to really wide just to accommodate long
threads.
This is not to say the problem can't be overcome or mitigated. I'm
just saying it's not as easy as it seems, and I'm glad for not being
the one who has to come out with a perfect solution. :)
--
Best regards,
Ming-Li
The Bat! 1.47 Beta/5 | Win2k SP1
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
View the TBUDL archive at http://tbudl.thebat.dutaint.com
To send a message to the list moderation team double click here:
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To Unsubscribe from TBUDL, double click here and send the message:
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
--------------------------------------------------------------
You are subscribed as : archive@jab.org
