[ticker-dev] Merging chat and news messages?

[Phil Cook]

On Thursday 18 July 2002 08:09 pm, Ted Phelps wrote:
> Klaus Alexander Seistrup may have said:
> > 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.
>
> I'm afraid that I'm not particularly keen on this idea.
>
> From my point of view, the format of a notification should not be
> bent, folded or mutilated in order to accomodate a particular
> consumer.  There's a tendency to make every notification into a
> tickertape notification because that's the only UI we have, and this
> feels like an extreme case of that tendency.  I'm not at all happy
> with the idea of a chat message having a "Subject" field.

I tend to agree with Ted here.  Ted mentioned at the Ticker workshop last year 
that he wanted to develop a language for transforming notifications in 
xtickertape.  I think this is the better route to take, and would also help 
to avoid the "tendency to make every notification into a tickertape 
notification".  If we've only got one UI, then we should make that UI 
flexible enough to handle a wide range of notification formats.  

A notification transformation language would also complement the subscription 
language by further reducing the coupling between producers and consumers.  
Consumers that are flexible enough to subscribe to a wide range of 
notifications (as many of the tickertape clients now are) should be flexible 
enough to do something useful with those notifications.  Any consumer that 
allows the user to specify an arbitrary subscription string, arguably, is 
incomplete if it doesn't let the user specify what to do with notifications 
that match that subscription.

So I propose we give some more thought to such a transformation language, and 
attempt to develop a library consumers can use to get at it.

Phil.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Phil Cook						 "No Neil, after you"
Ph.D. student at large						- Buzz Aldrin
School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
The University of Queensland, QLD, 4072, Australia