Easier management with hierarchical accounts.

[nicerobot]

i'd like to create a few "default" accounts that contain all the most common settings among all my accounts. When I create new accounts, I'd base them on one of these defaults. The benefit here is that RDF can be smaller because there's be fewer attributes (especially charsets) per account.

[tanstaafl]

i'd like to create a few "default" accounts that contain all the most common settings among all my accounts. When I create new accounts, I'd base them on one of these defaults. The benefit here is that RDF can be smaller because there's be fewer attributes (especially charsets) per account.

You can already accomplish this...

Simply create a new Group, name it 'My Defaults' or something similar...

Then create your three Default Accounts under it, and whenever you want to create a new Account, simply Clone the new one from whichever of your Defaults you want it based on.

The only caveat is, when you clone it, it will still be in the 'My Defaults' group, so you'd then  have to move it to the appropriate Group.

Hope this helps...

[Eric H. Jung]

By "clone", tanstaafl means use the "copy" command

[tanstaafl]

By "clone", tanstaafl means use the "copy" command

Wups, u got me...

[nicerobot]

Sorry, I wasn't clear in the explanation. I'm talking about reducing the size of the RDF file by using references to other entries within the RDF file itself. For example, when I copy an entry, instead of copying all the attributes, just reference the copied entry. Then, only when I change something about the new copy will that attribute override the copied entry's attribute.
The idea here is that I can edit the parent entries which will change all the children.
To make it easier for users to understand, there could be a 'copy' mode (as it is now) and a new 'inherit' mode.

[Eric H. Jung]

Gecko, the mozilla component responsible for writing RDF, doesn't provide a means to optimize the way it writes XML. We're stuck with it the way it is unless we switch to extension-managed XML (i.e., custom XML) instead of RDF.

[tanstaafl]

Ahh... interesting idea, but not sure how important it is... I mean, I have about 65 accounts, and my RDF file is only 66KB. So, even if you had 600 accounts, the RDF file still would be less than a megabyte...

I don't see this as important enough to warrant complicating anything...

[Eric H. Jung]

Agreed.