Mailing documents
See also: other projects, posting
to news, linking into frozen documents
Requirements
This is related to the news posting
project ., which should be done at
the same time or earlier.
A requiremnent is to be able to mail
hypertext using the following operations
identical to the news posting interface
Mail address object
A new object is deisgned, a mail
address, which corresponds to a URL
of the "mailto:" form. In the initial
stage, this may be just a small window
containing the name, email address,
and optional picture etc. If mail
indexing software is also available,
then the mailbox object could include
embedded ot have a link to a list
of all messages to and from that
person.
The semantics of the mail address
object are that making a link from
it to a given object sends the object
by mail to that address. This is
represented by adding the object
to the list of objects sent to the
object.
Note that the mail address object
referred to here is different from
a mailbox or folder in most mail
appliations. It represents an address,
rather than a folder.
Note also of course that the view
of a mail address for any given user
will be different, in that the system
will be able to determine different
information about that object on
the user's behalf.
- When posting is confirmed, document
becomes uneditable, and NNTP postings
and mailings are made. When the
window is closed, the document disappears
and can only be retrieved from one
of the newsgroups or mailboxes which
it was posted. It is then an uneditable
document.
Linking to frozen documents
Mail and news articles are frozen
once they are posted. One can therefore
make links to specific lines or characters
in them, by given an anchor name
which is a line or character count.
A good solid unambiguous specification
of this for arbitrary MIME messages
would be needed. The plain text
object would have to be extended
to allow this form of anchor to be
generated.
A possible interesting intermediate
form of object is a plain text object
which uses link/char count ranges
for anchor names,. and which allows
outgoing links which are stored in
the rfc8222 style object metainformation.
The same applies to anchors in images
such as GIFs or even videos. The
anchor shape should be defined in
a
Tim BL