[Standards] adding body as RECOMMENDED field for PEP-protocols?

Thu Jun 14 21:45:33 CDT 2007

Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> Adam Nemeth wrote:
>> On 6/11/07, Olivier Goffart <ogoffart at kde.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> And i would even put the body element in the root of the message 
>>> element. So
>>> even client that doesn't support pubsub can receive such message
>>>
>>
>> Hmm... I disagree here a bit, but of course, you're the developer, so
>> the final decision is always yours ;) Here are my reasons:
>>
>> 1) It's not standard compliant I believe: every pubsub event is a
>> subchild of <event> field (at least I think this looking at XEP-0060
>> examples), so you can't go out of this field anyway without breaking
>> the protocol
>>
>> 2) We want (at least, me :) PEP protocols to spread, so I believe it
>> would be a bad idea to let it be granted (after all, it's not a
>> message, it's not a presence, but something in between, probably
>> closer to presence but not that close)
>>
>> 3) Personally I'd like to see it through knotify/growl, and not a
>> message - since it would be hard to tell if user typed it in or it is
>> just automatic eventing from AmaroK. Example:
>>
>> http://jabbermania.blogspot.com/2007/05/general-pubsub-pep-receiver.html
>>
>> Look at the picture (mockup of knotify).
>>
>> Of course it's only my personal taste, but differentiating eventing
>> protocols from standard messages is a feature I believe.
> 
> This gets back to something that Justin Karneges keeps mentioning. If 
> you receive a message with a <body/> will your client just assume it's a 
> regular old chat message? Probably. So then you're going to have all 
> sorts of messages popping up "Adam is giving a presentation", "Oliver is 
>  at the movies", "Peter is listening to Heart of the Sunrise" and so on, 
> it will drive you crazy and you'll quickly curse the day you ever 
> enabled that feature.
> 
> Peter
> 
> 

You are right, application payloads getting sent (as messages) should, 
imo, not contain <body /> unless it expects to communicate that to the user.
In a lot of cases for pep typically, it would be consumed by the client 
to appropriately add meta-data for the contact - it just would not make 
sense to show the plain text info to user.

That being said, we should not preclude addition of body, it might make 
sense for usecases (maybe where pep is more used like pubsub with 
infrequent updates ?)

Mridul