ihasmail's mail list was built for a mouse. A row is clicked, right-clicked
and dragged into a folder, and on a touchscreen two of those three do not
exist -- so the phone layout had the shape of a mail app and none of the
handling, and the things people reach for first simply did nothing.
Four gestures, all touch-only, so a mouse keeps drag-to-folder unchanged:
- Swipe a row sideways to act on it. Each direction is a setting -- right
archives and left deletes by default, matching the app the phone came
with -- and the strip revealed behind the row names what will happen in
the folder it is happening in: "Delete forever" out of Deleted Items,
"Not spam" inside Junk Mail, and nothing at all where the action is a
no-op, in which case the row will not move that way.
- Hold a row to select it. Selection was reachable already, by aiming at a
checkbox beside an avatar, which is not how anyone selects mail on a
phone. The selection toolbar gained an overflow menu at the same time:
report spam, mark unread and label were hidden on narrow screens and had
nowhere else to be, so touch selection could not reach them at all.
- Hold a folder for the menu its ⋮ button opens.
- Pull the list down to refresh, and drag in from the left edge of a
conversation to go back. The toolbar's button and arrow both stay: a
gesture with no visible control is one only the people who already know
about it can use.
The arithmetic behind them is in lib/touch.ts, away from the components and
under test, because the numbers are the whole thing: an axis lock biased
towards the vertical, so a diagonal flick stays a scroll rather than
deleting whatever it passes over.
Two layout bugs turned up while checking this on a 390px screen, both
older than the gestures. The app shell is a grid with only its rows named,
so it took an implicit auto column sized to the top bar's min-content --
about 470px -- and every message row ran off the right of the glass with
its date beyond the edge. The column is now stated as minmax(0, 1fr), and
the search field is allowed to shrink. Full-screen surfaces measure in dvh
rather than vh, and the tab bar, drawer and compose button keep out from
under the notch and the home indicator.
A dark theme carrying ihasmail.org's palette: a teal-navy ground rather
than the blue-slate of the plain dark theme, with the orange the logo's
cat is drawn in doing the work of the star and the warning colour. The
values are the site's own, read from its stylesheet rather than picked
by eye.
It is a theme rather than an accent because it changes backgrounds,
borders and text as well as the highlight -- an accent could not.
It rides on data-theme="dark" and adds data-palette="ihasmail" on top,
so the eleven dark-only rules further down the stylesheet keep applying
without being duplicated for a second dark theme. Specificity then does
something deliberate: the palette block is 0,2,0 and the accent variants
are 0,3,0, so a chosen accent still wins over it -- and because the
default accent ("teal") has no rule of its own, ihasmail.org's accent is
what shows until someone picks another. Verified both ways in a browser.
It is now what a new account starts on, so the app looks like itself
before anyone has chosen anything. Only a default: a stored theme always
wins, which leaves everyone already using ihasmail where they are, since
the setting is saved whether or not they deliberately picked it.
While here, the theme-color meta tag was fixed. There were two, both
carrying media attributes, and applyTheme looks for
:not([media]) -- so it matched neither and the browser chrome had never
followed the chosen theme at all, only what the OS preferred. One tag
now, updated from JS, starting at the default theme's background so the
first paint is right too.
Contrast measured rather than assumed, against the theme's own
background: text 14.5:1, muted 8.6:1, faint 6.4:1, accent 8.0:1, link
9.8:1, star 7.9:1, accent-on-accent 8.4:1. All AA or better.
Messages render on a white card in every theme. That is deliberate for mail
that styles itself, but #4 points out the case it gets wrong: a message with
no styling of its own has nothing worth preserving, and flashing white at
someone reading in the dark is a real cost.
Appearance gains a switch under the theme cards, off by default so the
current behaviour is unchanged. With it on, HTML mail that declares no
colours follows the app theme; mail that sets a background or text colour
still gets the light card it was designed for, because half-darkening someone
else's design is worse than leaving it alone. Plain-text mail already
followed the theme and is untouched by the switch.
The themed palette is expressed in the app's own custom properties, which
cross the shadow boundary, so switching theme repaints open messages without
re-rendering them, and the accent-coloured link stays consistent. The host
element takes color-scheme: inherit so form controls and scrollbars inside a
message match too.
htmlDeclaresColors covers bgcolor attributes, <font color>, and colour or
background declarations in style attributes and <style> blocks, while
ignoring near-misses like border-color and ?color= in a URL.
Closes#4
jcoffey-dev