At 6:18 AM -0700 5/3/99, Adrian Pfisterer wrote:
>With JetSend two communication appliances *negotiate* (through the JetSend
>protocols) content. And (this is the clincher) the two devices are
>required to support the JetSend mandatory content format. This guarantees
>that the two devices will be able to exchange content in a meaningful way.
This is similar to how many systems attempt to implement clipboard-based
data exchange between applications.
One consistent problem with that scheme is that there's no good way for
apps to negotiate for the least loss of content in the data.
e.g. MS Word says "I can export a ton of formats, including Word '96, '97,
'98, RTF, and plain text". But what it doesn't say is that you get 100% of
your content only with Word '98 format, maybe 95% of it with '97, maybe 90%
with '96, maybe 80% with RTF, and only 20% with text.
On the recieving end, an app may be able to import Word '96, RTF, and text,
but it has to throw away 40% of the info in the Word format, 30% in RTF,
and 0% in the text format.
Given full knowledge about how much information is lost, it's relatively
easy to pick an optimal exchange format. But if you have to implement a
deterministic algorithm that only looks at the formats available, this
isn't solvable.
Does JetSend address this?
Perhaps it's simpler said to note that the Address book can't do a darn
thing with 300dpi input, so the actual information transfer is 0% for that
case. ...and it can't do very much with ASCII, not without additional
rules to parse the text. That's what vCard is for...
--Bob
