[JDEV] formatting in messages

[Rob Brown]

(just as I was about to post this, I see Wally's fascinating Universal 
Picture Language thing....which makes the below suggestion seem entirely 
uninspired. :-) )

I couldn't find anything in the docs indicating whether it is allowable for 
messages to include any sort of html-style formatting.  I understand that 
current clients probably don't support it, but it would be nice to at least 
account for it in the format of messages so that future clients may.  As a 
start, say I want to put a bold or italic or something by using <b></b> 
tags or the like.

I would expect some people would argue that instant messaging is by nature 
instant, and therefore this is inappropriate, but IMHO that's a bit short 
sighted.  But I don't want to start a religious debate. :)

A nice approach might be if a client was able to "publish" its display 
capabilities, so the sender would know whether or not it is appropriate to 
send formatted messages.  Alternatively (or in addition) the server might 
be able to do the work of stripping out tags that less-sophisticated 
receiving clients will not be able to display, and maybe even do some 
"translation" for plain-text-only clients: for instance surrounding bolded 
text with *'s or replacing excerpt bars with >'s or the like.

Any thoughts on this?  I'd guess that XHTML would be appropriate so it more 
properly fits into an XML model.

BTW, I'm not really suggesting anyone get to work on this right away (other 
than to possibly keep such things in mind as protocols/formats are developed).

-rob