[Users] Fresh Installation of Claws-Mail

[Andrej Kacian]

On Sat, 2 May 2020 07:44:04 -0400
Jerry <jerry at seibercom.net> wrote:

> I certainly do not want to offend anyone; however, 'dillo' sucks. I
> don't know why the claws-mail team chose it for their HTML
> engine. As far as I can tell, it is not even maintained. I have never
> used the 'LiteHTML' plug-in. I have heard that at best it is mediocre
> but never-the-less, better than 'dillo.' The 'fancy' plug-in worked
> exceptionally well.

You can thank all the "web for everything" people for making the HTML
standard so complex and convoluted that it takes a team of dozens, if
not hundreds of people in order to implement a fully compliant HTML
renderer. The majority of rendering complexity is due to the byzantine
rules of CSS layouting.

All the big HTML renderers (Webkit, Chrome, Firefox, ...) have this
kind of manpower and budget to maintain it. In comparison, Dillo is a
work of perhaps half a dozen people, and Litehtml is work of just
one person.

I myself find the Litehtml plugin sufficient for the simple HTML
layouts of blog posts I read via their RSS feeds, and the occasional
invoice e-mail. Where it often falls down hard is commercial spam,
which tend to be very heavy on CSS layout. Then again, not being able to
read commercial spam can probably be considered a feature. :)

I get that not everyone's use of HTML mail is as basic as mine, so
Litehtml (or Dillo) plugins are not ideal for other people. However,
there is nothing better, given the dependencies and requirements of
available rendering engines.

Options? Webkit via the Fancy plugin might see its big return in the
GTK3 version of Claws Mail. There is Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF),
which could also be "pluginized", if someone feels motivated enough to
scratch that itch. As far as Firefox' engine, I don't think it is
available to being embedded in a plugin.

On MacOS, the apple's HTML engine could perhaps also be used in a
plugin, but it will take a MacOS-friendly developer to write such a
plugin.

On Windows, neither the old, nor the new HTML engine are embeddable in
the way Claws Mail needs.

-- 
Andrej Kacian
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