Microformats are not for data storage

Particularly, I'm going to be talking about
"hChat".

Personally, I see the primary use case of a chat microformat
to be for  
displaying of chat contents in a live (or semi-live) way.
There are  
quite a few examples of this in the wild -- web-based IM
clients like  
Meebo, and Adium and Kopete's message view, both of which
are HTML  
based.

Contrarily, most data formats are not HTML based (XML based,
usually),  
or if they are, do not use modern HTML (i.e. AOL's HTML log
format).

I think the chat group should alter its focus to providing
ways to  
semantically talk about the structure of a chat and a
particular  
message entry. One of the most obvious benefits in this area
is much  
better clipboard support -- copying things out of Meebo and
Adium/ 
Kopete's HTML view usually results in an un-useful mess.

Another important use case, that I think there has been some
research  
towards already, is "snippets". That is, small
snippets of an IM  
conversation in a blog post. This, conveniently, goes along
with my  
earlier point about copy-paste.

Just a couple of other points that have been percolating:
  - the use of hCard to mark up people's names
  - Time zone information is important -- particularly wrt.
time time  
zone of the sender and the time zone of the receiver.

This email has been a long time coming -- I've waited for a
couple of  
months, just lurking and trying to understand the process.
Should  
people agree that this is the direction research should go,
I'll start  
working on getting links on the wiki to examples of
documentations of  
chat representations. I think that the idea of chat
*logging* is a  
well-solved problem by XML and microformats shouldn't be
butting their  
heads in -- especially since most of the time full logs
aren't  
available on the web (the uF log bot being a notable, and
interesting,  
exception).

In the interest of full disclosure: I'm one of the
developers of Adium  
-- we're looking into improving our message view, and
copy/paste has  
been something that's plagued us for a while. I'm also one
of the  
primary authors of an XML based log format that's been
adopted by  
Adium, Gaim and Kopete.

--
Colin Barrett
Developer, Adium
http://adiumx.com
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