[ticker-dev] presence protocol publication

[David Arnold]

-->"Rainer" == Ruggaber, Rainer <rainer.ruggaber at sap.com> writes:

Rainer,

(quoting with permission ...)

  Rainer> just a quick question on the presence protocol. How would
  Rainer> you realize "substates"? Something like "online but on the
  Rainer> phone" or "in an elvinKonference"? would it be reasonable to
  Rainer> use the status-text?

in my head, i translate the Status value "tokens" like

   online        -->  active
   unavailable?  -->  idle
   unavailable   -->  unavailable
   offline       -->  offline

i personally find the semantics of the Status field confusing, and
have suggested in the past that it be split and clarified, but i
wasn't able to convince people ;-)

for the cases above ("on the phone" or "in a conference"), you could

- manually set your status to "unavailable", indicating that you did
  not wish to be disturbed

- leave it in automatic mode, which will flip between "online" and
  "unavailable?" depending on how often you use the mouse or keyboard

in addition, you could set some Status-Text message to indicate what
you're doing, but this is really only useful to humans who speak your
language ;-)

  Rainer> It seems that there might be some parsing problems. Would it
  Rainer> be better to use an extra field in the message for it?

ignoring the message that you might leave for humans, what information
are you trying to make available to programs?  what use is it to a
program to know you are using the phone instead of just idle, for example?

  Rainer> Is the Status field limited to the examples given in the
  Rainer> presence specification? (so is it something like an
  Rainer> enumeration?)

it is not limited to these example, but, according to the latest draft
it supports one other value -- "coffee", and any different value will
be treated by programs as `falling between "unavailable" and
"offline"', which is where "coffee" is as well (see section 3.8 of
draft 0.4.1 of the spec).

  Rainer> I am asking all these questions because for some of our demo
  Rainer> applications it might be nice to have a presence protocol
  Rainer> that provides more detailed information. So something like a
  Rainer> generic presence protocol (with extensible states) would be
  Rainer> great.

i'd be interested to hear what you might do with additional states.
could you explain an example usage?





d