Notes/Web Coexistence Tip #4

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ahh, but when is a foolish inconsistency the hobgoblin of disgruntled minds?  That is the question.  

A customer was using our Send It! sample (sending MIME mail using Midas), and raised the question about why the doclink symbols don't look the same when sent through the mail.  He is using our new feature (only available in an interim release at the moment) to send doclinks using the original doclink symbols, or so I thought.  He tried all the different types of links, doclinks, view links, db links and even anchor links, and they all looked different.  

I realized that I accidentally used the web versions of these symbols rather than the Notes versions.  That's right, the symbols used on the web do not match those used in Notes.  In fact, the symbols used on the web are not even the same between R5 and ND 6.  I have not had a chance to check out R4.6 or ND6.5, but they may well be different there as well.  (Go ahead, post if you know)

Anyway, here are the different sets of symbols:

Notes symbols
Doclink:
View link:
DB link:
Anchor link:

ND6 symbols
Doclink:
View link:
DB link:
Anchor link:

R5 symbols
Doclink:
View link:
DB link:
Anchor link:

So, why are these different?  Do the symbols look so much better?  Certainly not the doclink, and what the heck is that ND6 db link?  I like the other ND6 choices, but if they were chosen, why not change the Notes symbols?  You can't say that it was important not to change, as that would certainly apply to the web as well.  I highly doubt that it would change the code much to replace these, yet the Notes symbols have stayed the same.

I guess we won't know the answer, but for the moment, I am going to have Midas (and our new COEX! Mail and COEX! Web when they are released) use the Notes standards.  It will make the customer happy, and it will make me feel a bit (foolishly?) consistent.

Coexistence Tip
As for the tip, simply copy the four GIF files in the first table into the /domino/icons directory under your data directory and magically your web documents that use links will look a bit more like your Notes documents.  Seems like a small thing, but real coexistence is partly a matter of lots of little things adding up.

Note: Thanks to Mark Ramos of Granite Software (the spamJam and ZMerge people) who created these GIF files for me.

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