Text 749, 67 rader
Skriven 2007-03-24 09:41:36 av Peter Knapper (3:772/1.10)
    Kommentar till text 743 av Mithgol the Webmaster (2:5063/88)
Ärende: FidoML, the future Fidonet Markup Language
==================================================
Greetings.... whoever you are...

 MtW> As you may have already seen, my example does not introduce 'just one 
 MtW> more HTML', it rather uses existing XTML as the 
 MtW> default XML namespace of FidoML (notice the attribute 
 MtW> value xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"). However, using just HTML is 
 MtW> not enough for Fidonet: we (Fidonet users) generally 
 MtW> do not restrict our echomail to common elements of 
 MtW> documents (headings, paragraphs, hyperlinks) that have 
 MtW> their equivalent tags in HTML ÄÄ so we always use some 
 MtW> common Fidonet-specific elements (greetings, quotes, 
 MtW> skipped lines, signatures, taglines, tearlines, origin 
 MtW> lines). They therefore need special Fidonet tags of 
 MtW> markup. Hence the additional FidoML namespace and tags 
 MtW> like <fido:greeting>, <fido:quote source="...">, 
 MtW> <fido:skip />, <fido:sig>, <fido:tagline>, 
 MtW> <fido:tearline>, <fido:origin address="..."> and such.

Unfortunately I think your vision is very small, it competely misses what
Fidonet is about AND it also misses the affects of your intended "expansion"
will have on Fidonet. I see your REAL problem as not the visibility affect of
the current content, but what it drags back into Fidonet from the Intenet. 

Fidonet uses the internet for the transport of its material, however to
actually get INTO Fidonet content a user has to have some "additional"
capability which either does not exist in most "general" internet users users,
or is not interesting enough for them to attempt to "get into fidonet". It is
that gap that defines what Fidonet is, and nothing else. The momemt you remove
that gap, then yes, you may very well flood our rivers with the masses, but
they will bring all their rubbish along with what little good they might have,
and then Fidonet will well and truly be finished.

It must be obvious to anyone that the internet transport environment has MANY
levels of players out there. Fidonet does not need nor want ALL the layers,
just the layers that have something useful to contribute TO FIDONET. 

Exactly what that is, is very hard to define these days. I think Fidonet
actually played a small part in developing some of the skills required to make
the internet work for the masses, hence why the internet eventually matured
from a Scientific "geek only" world (the 1980's), into something more suitable
for the "general population" of the world (the 1990's). On the internet the
"geeks" remain", and are more visible now (the techologies available for
observing them are much better), but instead of dominating as in the 1980's
internet, they are just a tiny part of the background noise that permeates the
internet these days... but they still exist...

One thing that the internet has managed to do better than Fidonet is to provide
methodolgies to "manage" the noise level. Fidonet uses a pretty heavy bat with
this one, its effective, but very manual and very heavy handed. The geeks still
have their "private" communication paths on the internet and its not always
easy for a user to penetrate them, but overall the internet handles this type
of issue much better than Fidonet.

I really think that fidonet has "done its bit" in helping people
communications, and anything that is left for it to do is fairly trivial, but
blasting fidonet out onto the web is not the way to do that (IMHO).

Your ideas a not new, they have all been tried before, however most people
eventually realise what the purpose behind all this really is.

Now.. just what was it you were trying to do/achieve?

Cheers.............pk.


--- Maximus/2 3.01
 * Origin: Another Good Point About OS/2 (3:772/1.10)