chat-brainstorming

Requirements

Scope

Should a microformat matching these requirements be capable of representing only transcripts of existing IM protocols or should it also be able to serve as an exchange format itself. This might be useful for simple AJAX IM platforms, although I doubt if XMPP is not per definition a better choise for such purposes. --BigSmoke 13:09, 21 Jun 2006 (PDT)

- Anything that can be parsed can be used in AJAX, so we don't need to consider this in developing a microformat. --Scott Reynen

Chat rooms

Is it useful for this microformat to support the representation of "chat rooms", such as IRC channels? --BigSmoke

- Location is a problem that can be clearly separated from chats. We should stick to solving the smallest problem possible, so we can more easily combine microformats later to solve larger problems. --Scott Reynen

Example playground

<div class="hchat-log">
  <p class="hchat-msg">
    <abbr class="time" title="YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS">HH:MM:SS</abbr>
    <!-- Please, fill me in -->
  </p>
</div>

Ideas

Using paragraphs to represent chat messages

I think that individual messages in a chat log should be formatted as XHTML paragraphs (<p>), because this is how conversations are commonly formatted. From the examples I gather that this is also what the ILRT Logger Bot currently does. --BigSmoke 13:09, 21 Jun 2006 (PDT)

- We can't assume all paragraphs are chat messages, so we'll need a class name to identify a chat message. Once a class name is identifying something as a message, what is the advantage of applying the additional stipulation of a specific HTML tag? It doesn't appear to aid parsing, and it only constrains publishers. --Scott Reynen