[Extra] Discussing SNIPPET

["Bron Gondwana" <[e-mail]>]

Hi All, 
 
I've just posted REPLACE off for publication after the expiry of the WGLC period and confirming the IPR status. 
 
In terms of the remaining documents, we have a couple of Sieve docs which Jiankang is busy Shepherding through their last calls, we have 64bit which we allowed to lapse (for now) and we have imap4rev2 which is a giant piece of work. 
 Finally, we have the recently adopted draft-ietf-extra-imap-fetch-snippet-00.
 
To summarise the discussion: 
 
1) there's nobody who thinks this is a bad idea 
2) there's general agreement that specifying an exact algorithm is bad 
3) while LAZY may or may not be that valuable, nobody minds it that much. Easy approach is to always generate regardless of the modifier. 
 
So much for the things everyone agreed on (please correct me if I missed anything!) Here's the issues under debate: 
 
a) Naming. The great difficulties, naming and cache invalidation! (and yep, we've got the second one too). Should it be called SNIPPET, or something else like PREVIEW? I'm asking largely because JMAP used "SearchSnippet" to refer to a fragment of matching text with terms hilighted. And JMAP used "preview" for the short piece of text (up to 256 characters) that represents the email content. 
 
b) Cache Invalidation. Ho hum. Is this an immutable property? If so, what happens if the server implementation changes? I'm quite happy to call it "softly immutable" myself - it might not be exactly the same bytes, but you can use the old version without major problems. 
 
c) Length:  
   The server SHOULD limit the length of the snippet text to 100
   characters.  The server MUST NOT output snippet text longer than 200
   characters.
 
I would prefer to bring this up to more like 200 for should and 256 for MUST NOT. 100 is a pretty short preview on big screens. I'd also be willing to have a way for the client to hint for shorter previews to save network bandwidth, but have servers generally store 256 chars. The syntax makes it quite easy to add a MAXLEN=80 or whatever to the fetch command. 
 
And yes, this would be trivial to implement in our server with its existing previews, and I would totally do it during last call :) 
 Bron. 
 
 
-- 
 Bron Gondwana, CEO, FastMail Pty Ltd 
 [e-mail]