The structured phrases conversions are too complicated to properly describe to novice users and are primarily targetted at advanced newsgroup users. These prefs should just have a default state and only advanced users can change them. The affected pages are the preference panels for viewing and composing messages. All the checkboxes and descriptions for these prefs should be removed. (But don't take out the emoticon stuff, it's cute :-)

then where would these prefs go? I think jennifer spent a lot of time trying to word the prefs and putting them in the prefs.

Lisa, they're just gone, not intending to be moved to another panel. Jennifer has already updated the spec.

nominating for nsbeta2. I think if we're going to remove these because they are confusing users, we might as well do it before the next beta.

Lisa, Simone and tried to think of a good way to write the text of this pref to adequately describe the feature(s) to users. We couldn't really come up with anything that really made it clear what the features were. In the process, the mail team decided that this was a pretty advanced feature and exposing it to average users wasn't the best idea. Instead, we will implement the most logical behavior by default. Advanced users who want to change it can do so with the hidden prefs.

I think we have a bug in bugscape on this since this will be for netscape commercial only. http://bugscape.netscape.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1062

putting on nsbeta2+ radar. will become a minus after 6/15

IMO, this is a DUP of bug 23582. My goal is to remove those prefs completely from Mailnews and expose them once for the whole suite (including AIM and browser).

We should go ahead and mark it a dup of the bug Ben mentions for mozilla. We have the bugscape bug to track for netscape commercial.

Why do you think, Mozilla and Netscape 6 should differ? IMO, we should resort to diversity only as the very last resort. Other vendors might have the same concerns like Netscape.

We,as in Netscape, decided that we want to turn these preferences off by default We also decided that these UI preferences were too confusing. This luckily coincided with what I think is your belief that these preferences are unnecessary (in the UI). Therefore we think taking them out of the Prefs ui will make everyone happy. We are only turning these off by default in the Netscape tree and are going to leave them on by default in mozilla as they currently are.

It is completely fine with me, with one execption: Please leave the structured phrases pref for display on. It does next to no harm (only adds style) and has next to no false positives. I want people to understand me, when I write *emphasis*­.ote, that MS Word does the conversion during writing automatically as well (i.e. if you type "*foo* ", "*foo*" is marked bold immediately).

IMO, this is an client/client interop issue. I happend to write some user docs. You can find them at <news://news.mozilla.org/3943878C.3050706@bucksch.org> (n.p.m.documentation, "TXT<->HTML converters user doc"). (The notes about prefs and the "Note" paragraph under "Using the HTML Composer" are irrelevant for NS6 now.) Maybe they are sufficient and you are feeling better with turning on the display perf then.

Cleaning up status whiteboard by marking beta2 minus (6/15 has passed) I'm going ahead and nominating this for beta3. It is a shame we couldn't get this simplification landed for beta2. I know that there are a lot of more critical items on everyone's plate, and it is good that folks are focusing on those blockers.

I'm not sure, my comments were understandable. I think, the TXT->HTML recognition of structs should be on by default Rationale: The smily recognition is also on *and* - the structs recognition is much less risky, because we only add style. The failures are usually obvious (bold in C-comments or Unix-commands?). The smily conversion, while generally being relatively safe, *replaces* the original content, so the harm in the failure case is larger. - the smily conversion is just "cute", because most Internet users know smilies. The structs conversion can be really helpful, because many users don't know this convention, but might recieve msgs using it. I don't think, the structs conversion will really confuse people. After a few instances, it should be possible to figure out the meaning. In addition to that, we explain it in the help.

Ops, reread the bug. Is it correct that N6 will have the smily conversion disabled by default? I would prefer to have in enabled (of course, since I coded it), but would not be violently against turning it off. Of course, my smilies vs. structs deathmatch is bogus then, but the arguments (helpful, while next to no harm) for enabling structs still apply, and I still vote for that.

+ per mail triage

correcting typo in status whiteboard

Adding myself to cc: list (replacing Simone).

I left the smilies but removed the structured phrases pref. fix checked in.

Verified as fixed on win32, linux, and macos using the following builds: win32 commercial seamonkey build 2000-092009-m18 installed on P500 Win98 linux commercial seamonkey build 2000-092008-m18 installed on P200 RedHat 6.2 macos commercial seamonkey build 2000-092008-m18 installed on G3/400 OS 9.04

Removing the mail1 keyword.