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

How much, and what kind of data is going to be in the file? The work done by the Unified Logging Format WG has a pretty good overview of the various types of things that an IM client would want to log. Don't make too much of a bikeshed about it -- I'm mostly linking it beacuse it's a good overview of the sorts of general element types (message, event, status) we probably want to use. --Colin Barrett 05:33, 22 Aug 2006 (PDT)

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

- On chat-formats and chat-examples, IRC logs are used. I would say we should include IRC logs in our spec -- it just makes sense to design for mult-user chat, because one-to-one messaging is just a special case of that. --Colin Barrett 05:33, 22 Aug 2006 (PDT)

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

- I'm not convinced that ‘messages are paragraphs’ is an overly fair assumption: Lots of chat is extremely fragmented into sentences (or even partial sentences). I'd be nervous about generalising the P element any further than it all ready.

I have a lot of love for Anne van Kesteren's chat mark-up (using Q elements for single line text, and BLOCKQUOTE > P for multiline messages, where the presence of newlines seems a more concrete basis on which to describe paragraph).

As far as block level element construction goes, AvK's mark-up again highlights the capability of raw HTML: OL is certainly correct, as is CITE and Q/BLOCKQUOTE. Paragraphs might not always be correct.

--BenWard 12:29, 24 Sep 2006 (PDT)

- No sooner do I say ‘OL is certainly correct’ but something comes up to question it. Those interested in developing hChat might also like to keep an eye on the WHATWG list where there's been some questioning of using OL for dialogue. Additionally, there's a fresh discussion on dialogue mark-up at Eric Meyer's blog.