Extended encoding

Extended encoding is an attempt to create a standard for transmitting structured data. The goals are flexibility, wide platform support and extensibility. It is currently available in the v0.6 branch and can be enabled by holding "Shift" while clicking on Send. It is planned that v5 addresses will have to support this. It's a work in progress, the basic plain text message works but don't expect anthing else at this time.

The data structure is in msgpack, then compressed with zlib. The top level is a key/value store, and the "" key (empty string) contains the value of the type of object, which can then have its individual format and standards.

Text fields are encoded using UTF-8.

Types

You can find the implementations in the src/messagetypes directory of PyBitmessage. Each type has its own file which includes one class, and they are dynamically loaded on startup. It's planned that this will also contain initialisation, rendering and so on, so that developers can simply add a new object type by adding a single file in the messagetypes directory and not have to change any other part of the code.

message

The replacement for the old messages. Mandatory keys are body and subject, others are currently not implemented and not mandatory. Proposed other keys:

• parents: array of msgids referring to messages that logically precede it in a conversation. Allows to create a threaded conversation view
• files: array of files (which is a key/value pair):
  • name: file name, mandatory
  • data: the binary data of the file
  • type: MIME content type
  • disposition: MIME content disposition, possible values are "inline" and "attachment"

vote

Dummy code available in the repository. Supposed to serve voting in a chan (thumbs up/down) for decentralised moderation. Does not actually do anything at the moment and specification can change.