TODO

• encryption for event data

• Terminology

term	definition
handle	full username like u.alice@example.com
field-pair	a key-value pair like localUsername=alice

• Protocol decisions

  • field-names

    Fields are to be sorted alphabetically. The type-field, which is required at every event, must be the first field.

    To allow filtering messages(for example to ignore all messages by a specific user), some order is declared:

    • the type-field is the first field

    • the username-field(if used) is the second one

    • short names

      As type, username and content are used heavily and field-names are sent in the payload, we declare the shortname t for type, u for localUsername and c for content respectively.

  • Events

    Everything is an event. Like in the matrix protocol.

  • Payload

    Payload is a bytearray with length-prefixed field-pairs. The payload is terminated with a 0-byte Strings are generally UTF-8 encoded.

    e.g 1t3msg1u5alice7c12Hello World!\0:

    • type is "msg"
    • sender(localUsername) is "alice"
    • content is "Hello World!"

    (If you're confused, see the short names section)