Changes to our IM formatting

[Mark Doliner]

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Florian Quèze<florian at instantbird.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 10:40, Mark Doliner<mark at kingant.net> wrote:
>> Currently this only happens if libpurple is compiled with
>> the USE_CSS_FORMATTING define, but I think we should make this the
>> only supported method in 3.0.0.
>>
>> Does this sound like a reasonable thing to do?  I'd especially love to
>> hear from other UIs like Adium and Instantbird, and from Sean/Arnold
>> (Arnold is the summer of code student working on webkit).  And for
>> Finch, we strip HTML before displaying IMs, right?
>
> Instantbird won't have any problem with using CSS formatting.

Great!  Thanks for responding.

> By the way, are there known UIs that display HTML but don't understand CSS?
> If there aren't, maybe you don't need to wait for 3.0 to change the
> default behavior.
> Or does this break an API that was documented and consistent enough
> for plugin writers to write code that depends on this?

I know that Pidgin only partially supports the font-size attribute.
It supports smaller, x-small, large, medium, etc., but it does not
support any numerical values, e.g. "10pt" or "24px" or "2em."  Of
course, we could certainly change Pidgin to support those, but it
sounds more and more likely that we'll move to webkit at some point in
the future, so any improvements to Pidgin's gtkimhtml would be "throw
away" work, to a certain extent.

And I'm not sure if we would want to switch from gtkimhtml to webkit
without bumping the major version to 3.0.  There may be plugins that
modify the IM dialog and expect to be able to modify a gtkimhtml
widget.

Likewise, while we may not have publicly documented the HTML that is
sent from libpurple to the UI, it is possible that user interfaces
have come to expect a certain format.  So yeah, we could probably make
CSS the default sooner.  It just depends on how UI developers feel,
and how far off 3.0 is.

-Mark