[445] in Zephyr_Comments
Re: Formatting commands
marc@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (marc@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue May 22 23:38:31 1990
>> Jik and I discussed this the other day, and I am now entirely convinced
>> that formatting in zephyrgrams should be out of band. Thus, the zwrite
>> program could load from a resource file (or command line options) whether
>> to recognize Scribe-style, TeX-style, verbatim, etc., for the formatting
>> commands.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that a definition of
the style of formatting should be out of band? That is, an opcode
(SCRIBE, TeX, VERBATIM, etc), and then @i(foo), or {\em foo} in the
text? I don't see how "formatting in zephyrgrams" can be "out of
band."
>> I was also wondering how hard it would be to put an option in zwrite to
>> cache the recipient location in a file in /tmp, then to read it from there
>> and bypass the server entirely. Thus, if I'm talking with jik, and I
>> know he's not going to move from pit-manager for three hours, I shouldn't
>> tie up the network and the servers --- I personally will often switch to
>> write, especially if zephyr is already overloaded.
Since zwrite never knows where the recipient is, this would be rather
difficult. A capability to have the server tell you the ip
address/port of a user would be necessary. There are other problems:
I could then send your zwgc a shutdown or a zpunt message. Right now,
our only defense against that happening is obscurity. There is also
no way (in krb4) to authenticate a message sent directly from one user
to another. But you said that.
