[Mailman-Developers] Parsing and Rendering rfc8222

[Hans G. Ehrbar]

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   ehrbar at economics.utah.edu
Economics Department, University of Utah     (801) 581 7797 (my office)
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