One thing has bothered me with the <excerpt> thing. It seems to
be purely presentational (like much the rest of richtext), but it's
such an obvious candidate for hypertext links between messages, if
done properly.
Consider this example from a message of Nathaniel's:
<excerpt><bold>Excerpts from internet.ietf-822: 4-Feb-92 richtext <lt>nl>
model conside.. Erik Naggum(_at_)naggum(_dot_)no (2255)</bold></excerpt><nl>
<nl>
Apart from the weird address on the end, the number I don't understand
what refers to, the <lt>nl> which I don't see what should mean, a
reference to "internet.ietf-822" which must be local to Nathaniel's
system, and the subject which is partly hacked, what's really
troubling is that there is no unique, machine-readable reference to
the message, just a lot of local stuff and non-trivial rewriting.
(Granted, the message-id is found in the In-Reply-To and References
headers, both of which are in a useful format.)
The rest of the excerpt looks like this in his message:
<excerpt> Of course, people signing their messages with what appear to be
an<nl>
</excerpt><excerpt>end-tag will always cause problems for the
unwary.<nl>
</excerpt><nl>
<excerpt>Cheers,<nl>
</excerpt><excerpt><lt>/Erik><nl>
</excerpt><nl>
I would like to see something like
<excerpt msgid="<23004(_dot_)05(_at_)erik(_dot_)naggum(_dot_)no>">
Of course, people signing their messages with what appear to be an
end-tag will always cause problems for the unwary.
Cheers,
</Erik>
</excerpt>
I'm having a lot of problems with the </excerpt><excerpt> stuff,
too. It makes it more difficult to find out what's content and what's
markup. Also, I don't understand the semantics of having <nl>'s
inside or outside the excerpt elements.
The most important thing with an excerpt, as I see it, is to
establish context. What better way to do this than to provide a means
to uniquely refer back to the message quoted, and thus pave the way
for a forward-reference hypertext-like feature? I'm thinking of
something like this:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Of course, people signing their messages with what appear to be an
end-tag will always cause problems for the unwary.
Cheers,
</Erik>
<see msgid="<kdXfefy0M2Yt1gAIxz(_at_)thumper(_dot_)bellcore(_dot_)com>">
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
One reason I took up looking at richtext, is that I'm working on
using HyTime for hyperlinks between USENET messages (and mail).
USENET messages have unique, formal identifiers to them which are
already used for lookup purposes. This can and should be exploited.
In mail, it's harder, because people insist on destroying information
in the In-Reply-To field, and don't use References.
If we started to use some machine-usable means of attribution,
this would be much, much simpler.
Best regards,
</Erik>
--
Erik Naggum | +47-295-0313 | ISO 8879 SGML | Memento,
Naggum Software | | DIS 10744 HyTime | terrigena.
Boks 1570, Vika | <erik(_at_)naggum(_dot_)no> | JTC 1/SC 18/WG 8 |
Memento,
0118 OSLO, NORWAY | <enag(_at_)ifi(_dot_)uio(_dot_)no> | SGML UG SIGhyper |
vita brevis.