server-side smart mail login

Basically, server-side systems produce HTML that includes a shack widget, like:

<object type="builtin/tree" data="http://server/mail2rdf.cgi?list_folders">

This is the tag for a shack widget, which will do pretty tree-display things with the RDF data. Your RDF data for a folder listing could look something like this:

<RDF:RDF>
<MailFolders name="root">
<child id="INBOX" href="http://server/mail2rdf.cgi?folder=INBOX"/>
<child id="Sent" href="http://server/mail2rdf.cgi?folder=Sent"/>
<child id="Family" href="http://server/mail2rdf.cgi?folder=Family"/>
</MailFolders>
</RDF:RDF>

For folder display, send back more HTML containing a shack widget, this time pointing at an RDF source for the message data. Perhaps something like:

<object width=100% height=100% type=builtin/tree data="http://server/mail2rdf.cgi?folder=INBOX&showmessages"
target="messages">
<param name="Column" value="mail:From">
<param name="Column" value="mail:Subject">
<param name="Column" value="mail:Date">
<param name="title" value="Subjects">
</object>

So now you can send back RDF summary data, with elements corresponding to the column headers, like <mail:From>:

<RDF:RDF>
<Topic id="root">
<Column href="mail:From"/>
<Column href="mail:Subject"/>
<Column href="mail:Date"/>
<child>
<Message href="http://server/newuser.html">
<mail:From>User Support</mail:From>
<mail:Subject>Welcome to smart mail</mail:Subject>
<mail:Date>The Epoch</mail:Date>
</Message>
</child>
<child>
<Message href="http://server/mail2rdf.cgi?show_msg=1">
<mail:From>Jamie Zawinski</mail:From>
<mail:Subject>Enough about the compass!</mail:Subject>
<mail:Date>July 15th, 1998</mail:Date>
</Message>
</child>
</Topic>
</RDF:RDF>