Re: Removal (Time for XMail?)

I see other advantages to working with an XML based P2P mail system, and
that has to do with architecting P2P client systems.  I look at the proposed
UDDI/WSDL/SOAP framework, and if I read the architecture correctly, in order
for a client to integrate into a web services model system would be for the
client to receive the presentation information (the HTML, XML, etc.) within
a SOAP message, extract it, then display it to the appropriate user agent
(perhaps the UA handles this process directly, which would seem the logical
route, but either way there is a layer (or more than one) that sits between
the client presentation and the HTTP layer that acts as the martialling
element of a light-weight P2P engine.

One impact that such an architecture would have would be to make a general
protocol distributed messaging layer as we're talking about here viable as a
client tool rather than simply as a B2B utility. It also ties in with
XForms, which as they were described to me by the chairman of that WG,  are
multiple sequential XHTML-like pages coupled within a general envelope, a la
WML <card>s.  I don't really see all that significant a difference in
developing an "XMail" schema vs. an "XHTML" schema vs. an "XForm" schema --
XForms and XMail in particular share the requirements of needing to be
potentially disconnected protocols.

-- Kurt Cagle
-- Author, XML Developer's Handbook

> >I'd also like to make this the basis for an extensible XML-P2P platform.
> >A mail application on top of that would be really exciting.
>
> Funny you should mention that. I have built an XML-based e-mail system on
> top of SMTP/MIME. And the legacy problems we've encountered have made it
> clear that the community needs to be moving on to a more XML-oriented
> substrate if we are to take full advantage of XML in e-mail.
>
> While the mandate of this group might not be to redefine e-mail (God, what
a
> nest of rats THAT would be!) it does seem that if we consider such issues
as
> part of our deliberations, we might be able to define a solution that both
> addresses the original mandate, and provides a watershed opportunity to
> e-mail systems.
>
> Frankly, throwing XML documents around the net is simply more efficient
and
> harbors more potential for flexibility and expressiveness than the
narrower
> (and sometimes less efficient) model enforced by MIME encoding.
>
> Jeff Smith
> Chief Technology Officer
> Metamail, Inc.
>
>

Received on Friday, 29 September 2000 17:17:48 UTC