[JDEV] formatting in messages

[Rob Brown]

At 04:18 PM 9/2/00 -0500, you wrote:
>See: http://docs.jabber.org/jpg/refmessage.html

Guess I was looking in the wrong place, I'm surprised I missed that! (thanks)

>At one point we suggested using a client feature negotiation IQ namespace, 
>but that never really took off. I'm unsure if there plans for pushing and 
>expanding this in the near future or not. temas?

This (moreso than the rich text itself) is very interesting to me.  I'd 
love to explore what cool things you can do on the client side, but it 
won't be much good if you can't tell what features a client supports.

Regarding the rich text -- I am one who uses html email a good bit with my 
regular correspondences (no, I don't use background colors or stationary! 
:) ), but I am also very sensitive to to which of them don't support it or 
don't like it.  I wish there was a good way of automating this, and hope 
something like this gets put into Jabber at an early stage.

Sending a plain text message in addition to a formatted one seems to be an 
awkward compromise to keep legacy systems still working, which isn't nearly 
as necessary in Jabber as it was with email.  I think it would be better to 
only send the plain text one *unless* we know the client supports rich 
text, and then send only the rich text one.  One or the other (the plain 
text one, or the rich text one) is going to be thrown away, so it makes 
sense to make that decision before even sending the message (unless of 
course it is going to multiple recipients).  A well designed client would 
not even present the UI for formatting if it knew the recipient wouldn't be 
able to see it.

As for legacy clients (or just very simple clients)....the assumption would 
be if you don't answer the "feature negotiation" query, you don't support 
any advanced features.

-rob