[JDEV] Rich Text in Messages

[Tony Requist]

> > I therefore propose this anthithesis to your scenario: How
> > feasible is it
> > to seriously detract from user experience, just because we
> > weren't willing
> > to spend another couple bucks on bandwidth?
>
> If you can guarantee that this will only cost each Jabber server
> administrator an extra USD$2.00, then it sounds like a good deal.  My
> concern is that two dollars is several orders of magnitude (somewhere
> between 4 and 8, depending on how many users you're serving) too low of an
> estimate.

I have to agree with the concern about costs.  Certainly every case is
unique, but I can spent considerable time actually building a business plan
and putting real numbers to this.  And I would guess that our business model
is not that different than many other service providers might be.

This is for a product that uses bandwidth many ways in addition to IM/chat,
and is projected (hopefully) to grow to millions of users.  Our bandwidth
costs are real numbers, based on considerable research.  And they
incorporate an aggressive estimate for bandwidth costs declining each year.

Basically, bandwidth is our largest cost, and our largest user of bandwidth
is IM/Chat.  Sending of the XML tags alone is enough of a cost that at some
point having a custom protocol might make enough difference to our
bottom-line that we would have to consider it.

If we do rich text, it will be in a custom, compressed format because there
is no way that we could justify the cost otherwise.

I know that this flies in the face of the Jabber philosophy and I have no
desire to start a religious battle over the wonder of standards and
interoperability.  I just thought our real-world experiences might be useful
to somebody else.

- tony