[dev] Thinking about IMP and Kronolith interoperability

[Kevin Myer]

I know I've seen some of these ideas expressed elsewhere but this is an attempt
to consolidate some of them and get feedback on whether they are worthwhile
investing effort into or not.

1)  Inline display of iTip attachments in IMP, by default.  If you don't display
attachments inline, this would eliminate the need to open a window to deal with
an event invitation (a window which, by the way, has no close button and just
kind of hangs out).  Instead, the invitation would appear inline.  If it makes
sense to render HTML inline, then it makes as much sense to invoke the iTip
MIME Viewer inline too.

2)  Combining the Add Event and Respond actions into one combined action (which
would be the default, but leaving them as separate options as well, in case you
only wanted to do one or the other but not both).  Since you will usually be
doing both of those actions if you are attending an event, it would make sense
to eliminate multiple clicks and needing to do menu selections by combining
these two.

1 and 2 would eliminate four clicks needed to accept and add an event to my
calendar.

3)  Enable a "text" version of the iTip attachment email that Kronolith
generates.  This would be similar to the plain text portion of an HTML email. 
If the mail client the recipient is using can't handle iTip, at least they
could glean some useful information from the text portion, like meeting name,
date, time, location, description, etc.

4)  Add ability to decline invitations, with a text input field for giving a
reason for declining.  I remember throwing out this idea on one of the lists
awhile ago, and Jan said he wasn't sure if there was anything in the spec that
allowed that to happen, within the vCal format.  If there was nothing that
could be taken advantage of, I'd envision this going into the body of a message
that contains the iTip attachment.

Is it a bad idea to use a hybrid iTip attachment/message body approach to
communicate meeting information, both for invitations, and for responses?

Kevin
-- 
Kevin M. Myer
Senior Systems Administrator
Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13  http://www.iu13.org