- From: Kurt Cagle <cagle@olywa.net>
- Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 14:22:17 -0000
- To: <xml-dist-app@w3.org>
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