[Mailman-Developers] Way into the future -- XML and Mailman?

[Gary Frederick]

I poked around with XMLizing email a while ago. I did a bit of testing with using J2EE's JavaMail to read email and turning headers and the various mime parts into xml. I also did a bit with making MHonArc XHTML.

My feel was that if email were XML, it would simplify parsing and that software that treated email as another source of information would start to become more common. I saw mailing list software as tapping into a stream of email and then doing what it does best. I did not see a big change on how stuff works. We would still get a message, apply whatever filters and send the message out. It would probably be a bit easier to 'see' what was happening with XML. I saw XMLizing email as a benefit for archiving. We could use XSLT to translate the email to whatever archive format without much work.

Then I went on to other things :-)

Gary

Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> 
> Have folks seen Jon Udell's piece on XML?
> 
> <http://www.infoworld.com/articles/pl/xml/02/10/28/ 021028plxmlclient.xml>
> 
> Some fascinating stuff in there. and I think in large part he's right.
> 
> But it's got me wondering, in a very blue-sky kind of way, how a move  
> to XML as a content model for e-mail and general data transfers is  
> going to impact mailing list systems like mailman. how would a  
> transition be handled?
> 
> I don't have a clue. It's something to be looked at for maybe Mailman  
> 5.0 or whatever, some forever into the future (where, in tech time,  
> forever is > 18 months).
> 
> But maybe it's soemthing folks ought to gnaw on a bit, just to start  
> thinking the issue over...
> 
> What if the future of email isn't HTML or style text (per se), but a  
> mime-encoded XML piece? How does that affect list servers? do they  
> mutate into specialized versions of a jabber server?
> 
>