Re: conversation history

On Mar 24, 2004, at 6:14 AM, Gabriel Radic wrote:
> Here a question, not necessarily a complaint or an enhancement 
> request. Are there any plans to create change the way the conversation 
> history is stored? I find my 500+ files not very efficient. Would a 
> database perform better?
>
> I also noticed that the files themselves are saved as they were, with 
> obsolete html tags et all. Wouldn't it be better if they were 
> optimised somehow and there was some meta-data ?

One thing to keep in mind is that the current system is quite 
transparent. The convos are just files in a predictable location on 
your disk. You don't need Fire, or other special software to read them. 
The HTML tags are a little wonky, but they do have the virtue of 
rendering in a web browser. This transparency can composability is very 
powerful - for instance, you can easily type a small command line to 
find all conversations in which "cheese" was mentioned, then display 
them.

Well, okay, I lied.

Since the convo files are called .session2, and not .html, no web 
browser that I tried will display the files. But it's a nice idea.

So, my vote for any changes to the stored convo format would be 
something like this:
* Make the file name end in .html
* Make there be no spaces in the file names, so as to ease integration 
with xargs
* Perhaps wrap each message in the convo with something like a 
<firemessage></firemessage> tag, and maybe even include a header like 
<fireconvo date=xxxx ....> to include some more metadata without 
interfering with web browser friendliness.

Jer



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