If mailman would be able to write an xml representation of each message to a separate file, that would be wonderful. Then one would be able to use xlst stylesheets to make custom archives. I hacked something like this together for an on-line class. The workflow was:
(1) mailman writes each message to disk as xml file, while at the same time also distributing the messages to the students. (2) I crawled these xml files with emacs (could also have been python but I was more comfortable with emacs) to concentrate as much info into each individual file as possible: each file had elements indicating which was the previous and the next message by the same student, and the previous and next message answering the same study question. If a student was referring to other messages in his message, this was also coded in xml in such a way that hyperlinks could be built from that code. (3) I also manually encoded the grade into this xml file, and included commentaries about the homework which would be visible in the archive, and commentaries which would only be sent privately to the student. If the answer was written so poorly that I had to edit the whole thing, then the original and the edited version was visible side by side in the archive. (4) different xlst stylesheets produced an archive of all messages with my comments accessible to all students, grade notification emails, and survey reports for every student about all of his or her grades. This is only one example. A translation of a mailing list discussion into a series of xml files can have many applications. Apparently there does not seem to be a generally accepted xml schema for email messages. I do not understand why. I would have thought this would be one of the first things to evolve after the xml specification was finalized. Am I missing something? Is it the difficulty to code all the non-standards compliant emails? Wouldn't it possible without too much trouble to turn the internal python representation of emails into xml? Hans G. Ehrbar -- Hans G. Ehrbar http://www.econ.utah.edu/~ehrbar [EMAIL PROTECTED] Economics Department, University of Utah (801) 581 7797 (my office) 1645 Campus Center Dr., Rm 308 (801) 581 7481 (econ office) Salt Lake City UT 84112-9300 (801) 585 5649 (FAX) _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp