Re: [ba-ohs-talk] New backlink metadata; mhpurple v0.2 released
> From: Eugene Eric Kim
>
> I'd like to propose a slight rephrasing of the problem expressed here.
> We don't need purple numbers to make e-mail granularly addressable. The
> problem is that we don't have standards for addressing e-mail granularly,
> nor the tools that implement these standards.
>
> I could write a program that used the following convention for granular
> addressability:
>
> mid:MIEJJJFBHJEBDEKGPHOPIEENCNAA.dynalt@dynalt.com#lines(23-34)
>
> No purple numbers necessary. It just says, address lines 23-34 of the
> e-mail with the given message ID. The problem is, for this to be useful,
> we need to standardize an addressing scheme, and build tools that support
> it. Designing data models and metamodeling languages, and building tools
> that support them, are some of the fundamental challenges of this group. (01)
Eugene, (02)
The problem with this scheme is that with the advent of windows that
wrap text, the lines aren't really lines anymore, ie., they're not
based upon the number of linefeeds. It'd likely need to be via
character addresses, which suggests that perhaps something like
XPath could do the trick, if the email was wrapped in an XML wrapper.
(And yes, I'm thinking XNode -- then from within Xindice it'd be
possible to refer to only the desired content, and an XSLT transform
could be used to hilite it, add a link target to the selected text,
whatever...) (03)
Murray (04)
......................................................................
Murray Altheim <mailto:m.altheim @ open.ac.uk>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK (05)
In the evening
The rice leaves in the garden
Rustle in the autumn wind
That blows through my reed hut. -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu (06)