2011/3/3 Gunnar Hellström <[email protected]>: > Peter, > You have a good series of straightforward constructive proposals that I > think should be considered. > > I just want to comment your first statement: > "1. It seems to me that the real-time-text feature is very important to a > few small classes of users (mainly deaf people, but perhaps also to > certain users of specialized applications such as emergency services and > hotlines). To everyone else, it is merely a curiosity." > > I cannot believe this. I think real-time text is next hot development in the > IM world. >
I think this is point is tangential and irrelevant to the actual spec discussion. However I'd like to say that I also disagree (and I use IM a *lot*) with the popularity of this feature. I have developed clients/servers, and am an IM power user myself. At no point have I felt tempted to implement "real-time text" transmission, even though I quite easily could have. Let's be clear - this concept is not at all new. As Mark mentioned, he was implementing it nearly 2 decades ago. Google Wave was probably the most recent example of this approach as well. I love Wave, I hated this feature. IM allows me to consider and rephrase a message to say exactly what I want, how I want. I frankly don't want my contact to see the message until I commit it with the "enter" key. Regardless of my personal dislike for the feature, if this really was the next "hot" thing, why has it waited around on/off for the past 20 years? What makes you think it's all going to change now? To my eyes it's clear it's not a popular feature, or key implementations would never have dropped support for it. In all, I agree with Peter that this is very much desired and even required by some people/communities - however I don't think you can claim that in the next few years everyone is going to be using this. Finally, I don't at all see that this holds any relevance to the specification. I think we should be open to accepting specs for anything that would be of use to enough people, and I believe all the specs should be of the same high quality. We're clearly heading down the right road, and that's what counts :) Regards, Matthew
