Even with tight access controls, a
newsgroup may be too public a venue for the kinds of collaboration
that need to occur. Authors can have thin skin; reviewers must often
deliver criticism; sometimes the review process works better using
private channels of communication rather than a shared bulletin
board. Fortunately there’s always more than one way to do
Internet groupware. Why not an email option? This turns out to be a
simple matter. The
end-tag handler shown in Example 9.10 has two modes: news and email. They’re
identical except for the address behind each comment link. In
email mode, the
address is a parameterized mailto: URL that uses the &body= trick we saw in Chapter 4, to launch an instance of the message composer
that’s preaddressed and preloaded with the chapter, section,
and text of the target element. Figure 9.6 shows
how this can work.
Ideally the message would be in HTML format so that the quoted text
could be styled—for example, in a smaller font and a different
color. Unfortunately current mail composers cannot override the
Content-Type:
header in order to force the message
into HTML mode.
This email technique offers benefits beyond private communication. Most notably, it requires no news server or web server. The comment form is handled entirely by the client. Users can even compose and send comments while offline.
If you configure the docbase to use the file:// protocol instead of http://, the docbase can be viewed offline too. This approach also does away with the need to configure web-server (and news-server) security. You can just email an instrumented docbase to one or more reviewers and receive comments as return email. If the comment messages are addressed to a list, this approach can even mimic the collaborative environment of the newsgroup.
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