[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

[Mattias Campe]

(I changed from e-mail adres: from cobnet at hotmail.com to this one, just 
that you know ;-) )

"Just" (few weeks) learned Jabber and I really like the open source 
thing, to bad that Jabber wasn't just before MSN, ICQ, ... :(

Great, open source, everyone can build his own client. Well the problem 
is that it is going the wrong way with the emoticons. Everybody can 
define it's own ones... You can say "So, what the f*ck is your problem", 
Well, for some really strange reason, a lot of people "kick" on 
emoticons. Real life example: I tried Everybuddy to give my sister 
MSN-acces through my linux box. She totally disliked the program because 
of the lack of emoticons.

Well, just fine, but what will make an emoticon and what not? We could 
take over all of the emoticons of MSN, being the most populary 
emoticon-IM-System on the whole planet. Real life example: tried to 
convince a friend of me to go with Jabber and not to take an MSN 
account. His friends were on MSN, so he did too :( .
I would rather like to continue the idea of "[JDEV] Leaving proprietary 
systems for what they are" because Jabber will make it, with or without 
MSN, ICQ, Yahoo!Messenger, ... So we just define our own emoticons.

I personally think that the representation of an emoticon should be 
descriptive, because it could be that people use a non-emoticon client 
(e.g. they find all those emoticons overhead). So instead of (l) (MSN 
example) we could use :love: Because I think "I :love: you" is more 
comprehensible than "I (l) you" (Hmm, maybe a bad example ;-) ). A 
problem that you have then, is that it will be probably all English. We 
could use esperanto instead, but I don't think a lot of people know a 
lot of esperanto ;-)...

But how will we do it?
I think it want be easy to try to make all existing clients using our 
guidelines. So I thought of the following: we build an emoticon website 
with explanation about our goal. We contact as much of graphic 
developers as we can, this to make it the client developers easy to 
build in new emoticons. Everything should be prepared: static emoticons, 
moving emoticons and as much emoticons as possible.

Once again, maybe this sounds strange to you, but people really kick on 
emoticons. It's like "programs don't have to be usefull, they have to be 
cool". I'm almost sure I can convince my sister just like that if a 
client would have cool emoticons.


Sorry that this is written like my idea will break through and sorry 
that I used "we" a lot, but that made it easier to write. BTW I don't 
think I'll have the time now help to develop this idea (if you would 
like it :D ) because of projects and coming examinations. Still I would 
like to have your thoughts on this one, maybe when my exams are finished 
I can try to (help) develop this idea.

greetings
.m.
aka (c)obnet

---
http://student.rug.ac.be/astrid/Internet/jabber.php