[JDEV] Two more avatar issues.

[David Waite]

Jens Alfke wrote:

> Two more thingies about the avatar proposal, which I have noticed today:
>
> (1) The avatar picture stored in server public XML is, well, public. 
> Access cannot be restricted. This may be an issue for some people if 
> they want to use a photo of themselves but not let just anyone see it. 
> For example, I wouldn't put it above some loser to write an app that 
> browses all the accounts on a server, gets their pictures and displays 
> them all in window, just so he can send IMs to the cute chicks.
>
> (2) I don't think avatars in conferences will work. You can send the 
> hash in your presence, but will it be possible for other people to get 
> the picture? The public XML storage definitely won't work for a nick 
> presentity, and what happens if someone sends an <iq> query directly 
> to a nick? Does it get routed to the real presentity or does the 
> chatroom reject it? Note all the "?"s -- the conference protocol is 
> tricky and ill-documented and I know it's being changed around as we 
> speak. 

Depends on the protocol - with the "groupchat" protocol, all IQs may or 
may not get rewritten and delivered to the user's resource; as you said, 
it was never defined. With the "conference" module in jabber.org CVS, 
there is a 'privacy' tag you specify when you join to indicate whether 
or not IQs should be routed. With "jcf", all IQ traffic is defined to go 
to the user's representation within the room, i.e. no IQs will be 
delivered to a user.

What we really have here is a need for subscribing to more than just a 
user's sessions, but to also to indicate interest and get published 
updates for other user data and session data. Presence just isn't 
fine-grained enough for that. If we had something fine-grained, you 
could just as well serialize the data within the push, rather than 
trying to use a hash to save bandwidth.

On a different note,  what is the benefit of being able to define an 
avatar for different resources? It seems like what a user wants is to 
see the same picture for the same person everytime.

-David Waite