StructuredTextQuotedLine
Structured Text processing of quoted lines
(and fancier email message stuff)
I think STX has a big future in the web-based messaging department. After all, its syntax was created to mimic that of common and intuitive markers already used by the plain-text-only newsgroup community, right?
So, how might we deal with an email message? Here's a short brainstorm. Comments and suggestions would be greatly apprectiated. Let's say you have a message thus:
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 11:42:28 -0400 From: Mike Lamb <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Cc: Bcc: Subject: Re: Baz Quux Quux Message-ID: <[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.61 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en Precedence: bulk On Wed, 13 Jun 2001 at 10:00am, David wrote: > On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, Clyde wrote: > > On Mon, 11 Jun 2001, Barry wrote: > > > On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, Alice wrote: > > > > I seriously doubt that. That's the most > > > > absurd thing I've ever heard! How do you > > > > expect us to believe something like that? > > > > > > What makes you say that, Alice? > > > > Barry, I think Alice's point is valid. > > > > You three don't know what you're talking about. So what do *you* think, David? 'Later -Mike
Wouldn't it be cool to have STX render it something like this:
Mike Lamb, "Re: Baz Quux Quux" Wed, June 13 @ 11:42am
David Wed, June 13 @ 10:00am
Clyde Wed, June 12
Barry Wed, June 11
Alice Wed, June 10
I seriously doubt that. That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard! How do you expect us to believe something like that?
What makes you say that, Alice?
Barry, I think Alice's point is valid.
You three don't know what you're talking about.
So what do you think, Daivd?
'Later -Mike
Have a look at the source. The linedrawing bit isn't really very complex. You just strip off one level of indent markers, STX process the paragraph that remains, and wrap it in a quick table with a colored td on the left. Easy.
Of course, there's a lot more that can be added to this. It should optimally be able to do something fancy with the headers so that the information they contain is still accessable. I was thinking, toss that info into a DHTML layer that becomes visiable as you mouseover a specific part of the rendered text. Or something like that. Add your ideas!
I figure that if the DC guys a clever enough to build a system that processes ascii-drawn boxes into HTML tables, this should be cake. -datagrok
- datagrok (Nov 2, 2001 11:12 am; Comment #1)
- Even though I said that the table code was simple, using CSS to accomplish this cleans things up a lot. However, you end up looking ugly in non-css-supporting browsers. Your call, I suppose.
Try this example. View source to see how much cleaner the code is:
Test date
Test dateTest dateone two threeTest datetestabcd