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Re: OT (and Flamebait): Top-Posting



On Fri, Jul 08, 2005 at 01:44:08AM -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
>     Now apply that to the providers that have to transport and store several
> hundred thousand in a day.

Oh, the overworked sysadmin with limited disk space. I read
about him and his overloaded servers just the other day in
the pages of Life Magazine. There was a tear in the corner
of his eye as he described his plight: his family never saw
him anymore because he had four gigabytes more mail to go
through everyday; his servers were near to bursting ... I
won't lie to you, I cried. I'm not ashamed to admit it.

This XML format would be no more of a burden on sysadmins
than HTML email or large attachments. Less, in fact.

>     Not possible because, as I pointed out, when one intersperses the response
> they should be trimming and replying based on context.  Because of this it is
> impossible to made code to present it as people want it because not only is
> information mission from trimming but taking an interspersed reply and
> removing all context means at times it would make no sense.

The word 'impossible' seems overdone.

Here's one way I can think of to do it, offhand: include the
entire quoted message somewhere else (say, a MIME
attachment to the response). Then use interspersed quotes
like so:

<message>
	<quote messageID="foo" startingByteNumber="30">
		Here's some text I'm
	</quote>
	
	<response>
	AND DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE THE ABSURDITY IN WHAT MY
OPPONENT SAYS? I AM SHOCKED -- SHOCKED!
	</response>
	
	<quote messageID="foo" startingByteNumber="50">
		brassed off about
	</quote>
</message>

The startingByteNumber refers to the message with
messageID=foo.

There's a difficulty with this, obviously, which is that
we'd have to hold the quoted message as an attachment. So
what do we do if our response quotes a message that contains
a 10-messages-deep nested quote? Do we have to hold all 10
messages as attachments in the response?

So there are challenges. But the word 'impossible' seems
excessive.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve@laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key

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