Merging chat and news messages?

[Klaus Alexander Seistrup]

G'day mates,

Currently, most clients are using the "old" notification formats to broadcast chat and news messages (chat v1.3 and news v1.0), as per the specs on <http://elvin.dstc.com/doc/prog/formats/browse.html>.

I was under the impression that the org.tickertape.message v2.0 was supposed to merge chat and news messages into a unified message format - a step that I welcome, since it somehow simplifies the writing of client implementations.

However, recently David pointed me towards a v3 draft of the chat protocol, mentioned in <http://elvin.dstc.edu.au/ListArchive/ticker-dev/archive/2002/04/msg00002.html>.  The memo specifies a "Message" field, which would contain "text to be displayed in the scroller (or similar user interface location)".

In spite of the memo title, "Tickertape Chat Protocol", I assume that v3 is also a unified message format that will handle both chat and Usenet messages - or at least this is wishful thinking - but I'm not sure how to implement this in my tickertape client(s).

Chat notifications need a field, currently labeled "Message", for the message content.  Usenet notifications need an extra field that will hold the article contents.  Both "Message" and "Body" are good candidate names for that field, except "Message" is used for short scroller messages in chat notifications, and cannot be used for article contents.

It would seem that Usenet notifications need a "Subject" and a "Body" field, where the "Subject" field is equivalent to the "Message" field in chat notifications, but this scheme is counterproductive if the goal is to unify the two notification formats.

Does anyone have a good naming scheme that would allow us to use the same notification format for chat and news messages?  Or should we simply keep the two formats separate, as in the old protocols?

On a side note, I would find it useful to have two optional fields: (1) a "Summary" field, that would summarize the contents of a news message (or perhaps we should just use the "Subject" type of field for that?), and (2) a "Keywords" field containing e.g. a comma (or even whitespace) separated list of keywords.

Whaddyathink?

  // Klaus

-- 
A man, just one -
also a fly, just one -
in the huge drawing room.