I think this kind of feature has already been discussed mixed with other topics. But I wanted to discuss it here.
Currently you can configure your subscription (theoritically in the XEP at least) very basically. Like "I want to receive the whole items, nothing, the whole body or only an excerpt, etc.). But if you want to have advanced configuration, you could "play" with subnodes, but this is very limited. A tag and category system would be advantageous. Let me give the examples I was dealing with when I thought about this all. First a blog with pubsub as I am writing a Wordpress plugin: currently my plugin enables only to subscribe to all the posts, or all the comments, or the comments of a given post (or absolutely everything of course). For this, I made a global container node (let's call it G). In this one, I have 2 subnodes: - a leaf node with all the posts (P); - a container node for comments (C), with inside leaf nodes for each posts (P1, P2, etc.). So if I want to subscribe to everything, I subscribe to G, G/P for only posts, G/C for all comments, and for instance G/C/P3 for all comments of post 3 (these are not really the node names I chose of course). Imagine you want to provide a way to subscribe only to some categories. For instance I like the blog posts of a guy about philosophy, but I don't care when he speaks about nuclear physics because I don't understand at all what he writes. Of course you could "emulate" categories with subnodes once again; but then when a post belongs to several categories, it will be copied to several nodes (and when modified, don't forget to sync all "copies"); moreover if you subscribe to both categories, you will receive the same publication several times. So the (or at least one) solution would be that all posts are in the same nodes, but they can be categorized. So a subscriber subscribes to the P node, then configure which categories interest him. And then the "decision" to notify a subscriber will be done at server side. Each time a new publication is done, the server will send it to any person whose configuration agrees. This can be done with categories, with tags, but also with authors (on multi-author blogs), etc. In fact the better system would allow flexibility. You will do such configuration through your Jabber client, but also my blog can generate such link: xmpp:pubsub.zemarmot.net?action=subscribe;node=home/zemarmot.net/jehan/blog/posts;categories=Jabber,Linux;tag=en If I click this link, my Jabber client will propose me to subscribe to the given node and configure it to receive only posts categorized under "Jabber" and "Linux", and tagged as "en" (because I would not speak any other language). Another instance: I was thinking about a real estate website where I subscribe to receive emails when they got a garage close to my appartment and under a given price. Why couldn't such configuration be available on a pubsub node which contains items to sell. And you configure your subscription to be notified only about items which interest you (under some price for instance, and in some category). What do you think of it? -- Jehan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jehan's Profile: http://www.jabberforum.org/member.php?userid=16911 View this thread: http://www.jabberforum.org/showthread.php?t=95
