[ticker-dev] Elvin presence specification extension ?

[David Arnold]

-->"Martin" == Wanicki, Martin <Martin.Wanicki at Australia.Boeing.com> writes:

  Martin> I had some ideas about an autoresponder providing
  Martin> information about the human operating the client as an
  Martin> extension of the presence protocol.

  Martin> The basics are that rather that having to maintain a central
  Martin> database of, say phone numbers, if a client is configured
  Martin> with details about the person, and is set to respond to
  Martin> "finger" type queries than it should. But we need a spec and
  Martin> protocol to ratify this so that all clients exporting this
  Martin> functionality have the same interface.

Matthew's spec proposed optional fields that the client could choose
to make public.

  Martin> I'm imagining getting a message dialog saying something like
  Martin> "foo" has requested personal information - do you wish to
  Martin> provide it"

problem with this is that over the weekend, i could get several
hundred of these on my work screen, which i've actually dealt with at
home.  i think dialogs like this make for simple DoS attacks ...

  Martin> The way this could work with the presence protocol is that a
  Martin> client could be configured to automatically respond to
  Martin> people in your group but to prompt you if a request comes
  Martin> from outside the group or completely ignore requests not
  Martin> from your group or from anywhere.

configuring a list of groups/users who are allowed to get this info
without bothering me seems sensible.  

  Martin> There should always be a reply, even if it's just to say the
  Martin> request was denied.

in Matthew's spec, this is just the normal Presence-Info reply.

  Martin> I'm suggesting the contents of the provision of information
  Martin> be completely at the users discretion. but the notification
  Martin> format of the response be defined

i guess we could agree on a naming scheme for some common fields, but
the idea was that any field could be added, so long as it had an `X-'
prefix.  your user agent can strip that for display, like
`X-Work-Phone' becomes `Work-Phone'.

but i guess i can see that people might like to have this agreed, and
internationalised, etc, for sexier display.

  Martin> Over to the tickerdev crew ... your thoughts ??

i'd like to get the base presence spec sorted, with the extension
mechanism included, which i think supports this as is.  perhaps then
we can debate a revision which includes a set of standard attribute
names for common personal info (phone, mobile, fax, whatever) ?





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