[JDEV] Avatar problem with clearing the picture

Jens Alfke jens at mac.com
Thu Sep 6 12:57:09 CDT 2001


I believe there is a glitch in one aspect of the avatar proposal. 
There's an explicit mechanism to cancel the avatar icon by sending an 
empty 'jabber:x:avatar' extension with no hash. This implies that if the 
extension isn't given at all, the icon is not canceled/cleared (since 
otherwise it would be simpler to cancel the icon just by not including 
the extension at all.)

However, I think this is incorrect. The reason is that if you first send 
presence with an avatar hash, and then later send presence with no 
extension -- thus continuing the same avatar picture -- only the second 
presence element will get sent to people who come online afterwards. 
These people will not see any avatar hash and will not know whether 
you've set a picture or whether any previously cached picture is still 
valid.

Therefore I suggest that we use the absence of the 'jabber:x:avatar' 
extension to indicate canceling the avatar picture. The extension with 
missing <hash> sub-element would not be valid. The change to the 
existing spec is to remove the <x> element from the example following 
"User disables their icon:".

Agreed?

--Jens

PS: For those just tuning in, the proposal is at 
<http://core.jabber.org/avatar.txt>.




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