Z-Geek Rant on SGML markup for Zephyr

Setting

• Begin: 1998-04-26, 0054
• Participants: amu, eichin, kcr, seph, xela

Discussion

amu/0054

Come up with a good DTD for zephyr logs. :-)

eichin/0055

no, I don't have a shared key yet, I'd have to set that up. (I have the last 80K or so still in this emacs buffer, but I'd have to cull out >geek< specifically...)

eichin/0057

heh. That's easy. Only tags you'd need are zgram [ time sender recipient kind class instance opcode auth format fromhost field+ ] all of which would be cdata except maybe opcode which could be null and use an attribute instead... auth as well...

amu/0057

yeah, it shouldn't be too hard. :-)

eichin/0100

so that would be

<zgram><time>Sun Apr 26 00:57:18 1998</time>
   <kind acked><class>geek</class><instance>logs</instance><opcode>
   <auth yes><sender>eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU</><recipient></>
   <format>Class $class ...</>   <fromhost>swat.thok.org</>
   <field>me</>
   <field>heh. That's easy ...</field>
</zgram>

eichin/0101

enhancements would include: breaking up time, sender, *maybe* fromhost into subfields making some of the parts attributes of zgram translating some of the scribe-like markup into something else...

amu/0103

I'm not sure you want to translate the scribe-like markup, since people sometimes forget to double @s.

xela/0105

I'll bet I'm not the only person who would like to see a migration to html or even latex-like markup for zephyr...

eichin/0105

right, I'm not sure you'd succeed in the translation enough for it to work. But it's (right?) worth thinking about.

eichin/0105

X M L! X M L!

kcr/0105

I think pretty much everyone agrees that html style markup is probably the way to go these days.

eichin/0105

:-)

eichin/0107

scribe-like markup served it's stated purpose (being easy for naive athena users to deal with - even though they've long since stopped learning scribe :-) But it is time to start upgrading. The nice thing about "real" markup is that down-converting it into scribe-like via a gateway should be *easy*....

seph/0107

gah, I much prefer the @'s to html syntax for zephyrs.

amu/0107

Well, with shortcuts like <b/foo/, *ML-style markup isn't that bad to type.

eichin/0108

mmm, is <i/this/ all that big a deal to type? and you have fewer parsing problems...

eichin/0109

of course, ideally you'd have a decent composition interface that would let you wysirn the markup...

seph/0109

I guess it's not to much harder, I don't know though, I guess it's just the learn-a-new-system hesitantcy

amu/0109

:-)

eichin/0109

sure - but the geeks will lead the way, so that won't be a problem :-)

eichin/0110

I haven't had time to look at mozilla to see if the xml code is worth stealing :-)

seph/0110

well, you could write a zephyr client that took that syntax and translated for the zephyr servers... :)