[ticker-dev] Ticker group "invitation" attachments

[Matthew Phillips]

David Arnold wrote:

>-->"Matthew" == Phillips, Matthew <Matthew.Phillips at dsto.defence.gov.au> writes:
>
>  Matthew> So I'm guessing (a) no one cares (fair enough ;) or (b) no
>  Matthew> one hates this idea badly enough to flame me.
>
>Well, I'd prefer that group descriptions used the existing format for
>key descriptions, so there was One True Way to ship keys about, with
>one matching MIME type, etc.
>
>But I understand that this means more work on your MIME parser, so I
>can see the attraction of a simpler, all-in-one format.
>
>  
>
I'm a bit conflicted about this myself, given my expressed sentiments 
about keeping it simple ;) However, this way has the key advantage of 
using a single, composable (nestable) syntax that can be accepted by a 
wide range of environments. Plus I see the MIME multipart approach as 
not being much easier in that it relies on one syntax for the payload 
and another (MIME multipart + inter-part references) for the composition 
of "nested" payloads.

Also, my research into MIME parsing libraries was a bit depressing, for 
the Java world anyway. They all seemed to be very limited, complex and 
bloated or very difficult to install, or all three. XML handling seems 
to be fairly standard in language libraries these days and, if not, well 
the one I bundle in Sticker (SAX + JDOM) is about 110K of bytecode so I 
assume it wouldn't be too terrible to have to bundle one in other languages.

You might note that, although the key format deviates from the One True 
Way, it does so by a direct, automatic (almost) mapping from name/value 
to XML attributes. So, although not ideal, there is a way to work out 
what the XML version of the simpler format is, and even to hack a small 
parser that just extracts the name="value" parts for parsing keys.

>  Matthew> Either way, does anyone object to me assuming this is a
>  Matthew> reasonable proposition and writing a short document to
>  Matthew> "standardise" it on tickertape.org?
>
>Documenting what Sticker does is a fine thing.
>
>What's the MIME type of this format?
>
I'm still suggesting "application/x-elvin-tickergroup".

>text/xml+foo?  Does anyone
>understand the rules for XML-based MIME?
>  
>
Of that I have no idea. XHTML is text/xml+html, but tacking the "xml+" 
seems like a hack to me (it implies there might be other ways to 
represent XHTML). In this case I'm proposing a One True XML Way for the 
group format, so whacking an xml in there seems a bit disingenuous.

Matthew.