[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

[dman]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2002 at 09:09:57AM +0200, Mattias Campe wrote:
| dman wrote:
| >On Thu, Apr 18, 2002 at 01:57:07AM +0200, Mattias Campe wrote:
| >...
| >| 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 ;-) ).
| >
| >People (me) who use non-graphical-smiley systems won't be bothered to
| >use colons to indicate an "emoticon".  If I want emphasis, I use the
| >existing ASCII-art convention of underscores or stars.  If I want an
| >"emoticon" I type, eg, :-).  If it just happens to be graphical on the
| >other side, I don't care.  IOW, it's fine like it is.
| 
| I didn't mean that everything should be with words to be descriptive, 
| like ":-)" itself is descriptive enough. Indeed, I would also want as 
| much ASCII-art as possible. But for those other "expressions" (e.g. 
| love) other things are needed and (l) (b) don't mean much to me.
| Suppose I'm a hardcore Windows-user and I talk to you through Jabber:
| 
| I just (e) u. I also have a (i) for your project. Maybe we could discuss 
| after a (~) or we could (b). I have some bad news, my (@) died, yeah, I 
| know: (u) .
| Damn, I'm tired, well, look at the (o), I'll need some (c) , no I'll 
| just (s) ... BTW, do not forget, it's my (^) tomorrow, hope to have good 
| weather so (h) Anyway, I'll (t) or (m) you tomorrow.

That looks horrible.

| Maybe, some of them you can figure out.

Not much other than the ones you explicitly told us.  (Actually, I
understand the "BTW" one!)

| But (supposing you never used MSN)

That's me.

| try to write the full text without looking at e.g. 
| http://communities.msn.com/Emoticons. The only thing I'm personally 
| afraid of is that a lot of clients will start using MSN emoticons. I'm 
| using Gabber myself and some friends use Exodus and a lot of the time I 
| have to ask what they mean with (t)(h)(i)(n)(g)(s) like this. Why 
| shouldn't it be done write the wright way?

The "wright" way (sorry, I had to) is to just write what you meant.
hax0rs can do all the nasty munging they want with their words, but
real hackers use real English (or their native tongue, if it's
different, and the other party also understands it).

| [...]
| >| 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.
| >
| >If you want to make a jabber client that does funny graphics with
| >certain text strings, go ahead.  I like eb's and gabber's non-support
| >of graphical smileys.  Exodus (a windows client) has graphical smiley
| >support, but if you're using win98 you need to fix it (windows, that
| >is).
| 
| Sorry, for the next 2-3 months I really won't have the time. And I 
| personally think there are already enough Jabber clients. I know Exodus 
| has emoticons but they are MSN emoticons :(

Is ":(" an MSN emoticon?  I thought those were universally understood
and come from the days before computers could handle graphics.

-D

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