Re: [ba-ohs-talk] bootstrap list message content & purple numbers
On Fri, 14 Dec 2001, Peter Jones wrote: (01)
> The posts that Jack Park and others make that are forwarded from other lists
> tend to appear as quoted excerpts with perhaps a small comment from the
> forwarder. However, the bulk of any following discussion might often revolve
> around quoting from the forwarded message (which tends to appear as quoted). (02)
Okay, so perhaps this is justification to refine the algorithm for adding
purple numbers to quoted text. The question then is, what's the right way
to do this? The simplest thing to do would be to do what you suggested,
which was to exclude ">" when processing. But, is that really the "right"
way to do it from an OHS context? (03)
>From an OHS context, quoted text is, or should be, a transclusion. So the
purple numbers in the quoted text should be the purple numbers from the
original text. (04)
The problem is, purple numbers are only unique within the context of the
current document. IDs are reused all the time. For example, all of the
e-mails archived from this list have an NID of "01". So if you
transcluded the first paragraph of any e-mail, you would have ID-clash. (05)
No problem. Just make purple numbers unique across the entire site as
opposed to individual documents, right? Well, sure, that would solve the
problem. But it would also introduce a new usability problem. Do you
really want to have visible purple numbers that read like "0245-af842-12"
after every node? This raises a more general, philosophical question: How
human readable should node IDs be? (06)
This is not some imaginary problem; the BA web site is faced with it right
now. We want to build a news system, where the news can appear on any
number of pages -- the home page, a news archive page, sites syndicating
BA news, etc. All news items should have purple numbers. The question
is, should those purple numbers be immutable? In other words, should a
news item always have the same purple numbers attached to it irregardless
of the context, or is it acceptable for the purple numbers of the news
item to vary depending on the page from which it is viewed? (07)
If the world had a real OHS, this wouldn't be a problem. But for now,
we're trying to add OHS-like features on top of the Web, and so we're
faced with issues like these. (08)
-Eugene (09)
--
+=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
| "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they |
+===== can have an excuse to drink alcohol." --Steve Martin ===========+ (010)