[JDEV] Rich Text in Messages
Thomas Charron
tcharron at ductape.net
Wed Dec 20 12:13:08 CST 2000
From: "Stephen D. Williams" <sdw at lig.net>
Subject: Re: [JDEV] Rich Text in Messages
> I strongly disagree. Presence should include capabilities. The
alternative
> is very inefficient since essentially every user would have to query every
> other user and this might determine if they wanted to have a conversation
in
> the first place. Imagine that you only spoke Spanish (an alternate
problem
> and good placeholder for a desired technical ability, like 'supports GSM
> audio'), when you enter a group chat or do a directory search, you're
going to
> want to filter for other people who have a 'Spanish' capability.
It really all depends on how you look at a Resource. Is a Resource a
different avenue for communications? Or is it a thing users use to
designate something they wish?
Prime example: Half of the people I've seen using WinJab use /WinJab as
their resource. The *OTHER* half, use /Home, /Work, etc.. This becomes an
issue becouse it means that a given resources capabilities can change
midstream. It's interesting food for thought, thats for sure..
> A better example would be that you are looking for someone to participate
in a
> multi-user game and need to know who else is also running that game.
> Insisting on polling for this kind of thing makes the system unusable and
> unextendable.
You'd want to end up using the 'browsing' capabilities that have been
tossed about by Jer, etc. At that point, you could have a 'registry' of
sorts, perhaps even the JUD, where you could browse VERY efficiently, so you
could do one query.. 'Show me all users who I may be able to play with'.
I'm not disagreeing with you on if capabilities should be included with
presence. I happen to agree on that, simply trying to look at other methods
for doing what your examples are about.. :-P
> If the concensus is that plain text is the least common denominator,
that's
> not too bad, although it's not 'competitive' with the commercial
> heavyweights. Even cell phones have the hardware to do bold or italics
text.
> Allowing it to be a capability allows both viewpoints.
But by standardizing on XHTML, it makes it actually very simple to have
XSL processors take the XHTML, and reformat it for, say, cell phones, etc.
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