2 ms·

For plaintext messages? Existing chat programs use formatted messages with quotes, bold text, smilies and whatnot.

• lmm 5y ago
  > Existing chat programs use formatted messages with quotes, bold text, smilies and whatnot. Right, but they're not arbitrarily nested tree structures. They're structured data that you want to represent in a structured way (e.g. lists of different kinds of spans), but I don't think a full DOM tree is a good representation.
  • GoblinSlayer 5y ago
    Quotes apparently allow nesting. That said, serializing trees in linear form isn't really a problem: each node simply specifies parent's index. The problem is that these nodes are polymorphic, protobuf doesn't like that.
    • lmm 5y ago
      oneof works reasonably well. It's not perfect but it's fine.