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June 23, 2008
Sieve (and other things) in XML
A mailing list I'm on today saw a message containing a link to an internet-draft defining an XML representation of Sieve. There seems to be various of examples of this with (e.g.) iCalendar, vCard, etc. I'm always a little ambivalent about these things, because it seems like a lot of work for relatively little gain. Still, it's pretty clear that some set of people are going to use an XML representation, so it does seem better that there's a single agreed-upon representation.
Looking over that draft also led me to RFC 3470, which has interesting thoughts about XML dialect design and use.
Posted by dmose at June 23, 2008 9:43 AM
Comments
I wouldn't consider the possibility of transforming any xml data into plaintext, xml, html or pdf as "little gain". Especially, since xslt allows for intermixing of different xml dialects, which could result in nice reports for different formats, easy injection into documentation efforts or converting of large datasets into another form.
Posted by: .jon at June 26, 2008 10:49 AM
@.jon: sure; it can act as an enabler for those sorts of things, but unless there are a sufficient number of such use cases that are hard to do with existing technologies, it's a just a giant leap sideways: you still have do the other work. Additionally, if some servers start only providing one of the two formats, then suddenly clients that want to deal with filtering data need to have parsers for _both_ formats. Now for some formats, having an XML representation does make it easy to stream with XMPP, but I'm not convinced that's an interesting use case for Sieve.
Posted by: Dan Mosedale at June 26, 2008 5:16 PM