Re: features & misfeatures

Hi Dave,

On Jan 26, 2005, at 23:36, Dave Johnson wrote:

> Except for problems parsing certain strings in RSS title attributes, 
> the RSS
> feed mechanism of Zoë consistently works and I personally use it
> extensively.  The ability to aggregate all sources of information 
> within Zoë
> is its prime usefulness for me.

Agree about the goal. But I would rather change the means.

> If I am the only one who finds this portion of Zoë useful then I would 
> guess
> that its usefulness has not be adequately marketed.

In a nutshell, this is what ZOË is all about :o)

> My only question with regard to removing it is this: what is the goal 
> of
> "Zoë" as a project ?

Regarding the current built-in aggregator, the immediate goal is to 
remove it altogether to simplify the application in the long run.

This doesn't mean that ZOË will shy away from things which are not 
traditionally regarded as "emails", but rather that it will use 
different means to get to them, namely use and abuse good, old 
standards protocols like POP and SMTP to get to the goodies.

Think about ZOË as a regular UNIX tool with standard input and output 
stream. It just happen that the 'streams' are structured as POP and 
SMTP instead of a bare file descriptor...

In other words, access to external data of any kind will be done solely 
through those standard protocols from now on.

For example, one could imagine some kind of POP service monitoring your 
entire file system and vending its content to ZOË for indexing purpose. 
Ditto for RSS. Or even a relational database. Or a code repository. 
Etc.

The possibilities are endless :)

Cheers,

R.





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