[Telepathy] Spec meeting notes on Mail Notification interface

[Nicolas Dufresne]

Le jeudi 21 janvier 2010 à 17:16 +0000, Simon McVittie a écrit :
> 
> In general, forbidding something from happening more than once per process
> makes life difficult for anyone with a plugin architecture; plugins can't
> know whether other plugins already did the one-per-process action. Use case:
> 
> * I have a process with plugins, all of which share a unique name (e.g. all
>   my plugins use dbus-glib, or all of them use QtDBus), like the Maemo 5
>   status menu
> * I install two mail notification plugins - written by different people,
>   perhaps - to see which one I want to keep using and which one I want to
>   discard
> * They both subscribe; neither should get an error
> * I decide one of them is better and uninstall the other one, causing the
>   plugin to be unloaded
> * The remaining plugin should still be subscribed

Fair enough for me.

> 
> > > HTTP mostly deals in bytes, not characters.
> > 
> > We only want to support a specialized form of HTTP POST data
> > (x-www-form-urlencoded), which is in ASCII. This data can be passed to
> > the browser by creating a temporary HTML file with redirecting form.
> 
> I see. If that's the case, why don't you just put it in a single string?

In x-www-form-urlencoded POST Data is represented in key/value pair. To
generate the HTML file, you would have to parse the single string to
split those key/value pairs into HTML nodes (<input type='hidden'
name='key'>value</input>). Also you don't really want to send a single
string with the HTML since your client could be a Netscape plugin, and
for those who don't know a Netscape plugin has a mean to open a web URL
with POST data (but cannot set cookies).

> Good idea. RequestInboxURL and RequestMailURL should also have capability
> flags; in practice we only care about webmail systems at the moment, but
> I can see that we might well want to support being told about new mail that's
> only available from IMAP or a proprietary protocol (MS Office Communications
> Server? Sametime? etc.) in later implementations.

For RequestInboxURL and RequestMailURL I had the following rules in
mind:
* RequestInboxURL is mandatory if UnreadMailCount is supported
* RequestMailURL is mandatory if (UnreadMails or ReceiveNewMails)
supported

RequestMailURL could fallback to InboxURL in the case it is not
supported. I haven't found any IM protocols that provide mail
notification without webmail. It's probably because the IM mail
notification is there to compensate the fact that you don't have a
specific application and protocol to handle mails. Also, if I remember
correctly, the next IMAP version will provide real-time notification, a
bit like Lotus Notes has (my guess why Sametime does not have mail
notification in it's protocol).

> 
> Regards,
>     Simon
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