[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

[Mattias Campe]

David Waite wrote:
> Michael Brown wrote:
> 
>> Sorry, I ment that the transports will have to do the translations when
>> messages are sent to other IM systems.  For example, if a graphical 
>> Jabber
>> user clicks the icon with the mouse for "email", they will see the 
>> icon on
>> their client, and when they send it to a text only Jabber client, the 
>> other
>> client will see :email:, however if they send it to someone on MSN, 
>> the MSN
>> transport must know to translate :email: to (e) so that native MSN 
>> clients
>> can interpret it. (and back again when messages come from MSN to 
>> Jabber.  So
>>
> What happens when someone wants to really send :email: or (e), rather 
> than a graphical icon ?
> 
> -David Waite
> 
> 
[...]

With every emoticons system/translation you are proposing this can 
happen. Still I don't think that a lot of people surround their words by 
colons (one in front ánd one in the back).
We could e.g. define an escape character, like if you want :email: to be 
shown as plain text you could type "~:email" the receiving client looks 
at the text, sees :email: but it is preceeded by the escape character 
"~" so the client shows ":email:" ... Of course, how many people would 
know that such an escape character exists?

.m.