[ticker-dev] Merging chat and news messages?

[Phillips, Matthew]

Hi Klaus/all,

since we're happily going to be breaking backwards compatibility anyway, I'd
vote we use "Subject" for the tickertext/usenet subject and "Body" for the
message content (if any)? Ticker clients would show the Subject in the
ticker and the body when the user "opens" or "selects" the message. I think
having the same core set of fields for Usenet and ticker is an excellent
goal, although it should also be possible to tell the two types apart if
necessary.

I like the idea of having a keywords field.

Cheers,

Matthew.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: kas-list at magnetic-ink.dk [mailto:kas-list at magnetic-ink.dk]
> Sent: Thursday, 11 July 2002 6:38 PM
> To: Tickertape Development
> Subject: [ticker-dev] Merging chat and news messages?
> 
> 
> 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.