[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

[Richard Dobson]

> As you all saw, my initial proposal was purely receiver-based (i.e.,
> the receiving program converted anything "interesting"-looking into
> an icon), but it looks to me like you're all trying to figure out some
> standard way of integrating non-text elements into messages :-(
>
> In that case, my proposal is simple - use an embedded element:
> <message to="dave at dave.tj">This is a <x xmlns="html"><img
src="http://dave.tj:8080/icons/envelope.png" alt="message"/></x> containing
<x xmlns="html"><img src="http://dave.tj:8080/icons/2emoticons.png" alt="two
emoticons"/></x>.</message>
>
> Any new client (text-only or non-text-only) will be able to support
> this quite easily, and any existing client won't be too difficult to
> modify to accomodate this convention.  In other words, it has all the
> advantages of HTML ... because ... ahem ... it ... well ... _is_ HTML ;-)
>
> Dave Cohen <dave at dave.tj>
>
> Motto: Never invent anything you don't have to :-)

Thats all good in theory but what about people who are behind firewalls and
proxy's?
And what about the unneccessary bandwidth it takes up, not just in the xml
but having to download those images, for something like emoticons isnt it
better just to have a way of defining that something is an emoticon and what
it represents so particular clients can display emoticons that better go
with a particular clients graphical style, and also whats to stop abuse of
this by either embedding enormous images that take ages to download or an
image with silly dimensions, also i will cause problems where people use a
lots of emoticons within a message, something like emoticons i dont think is
best delt with by embedding it in this way.

This is another good enhancement but I think is better for embedding images
that are only going to be sent spairingly, like someone sending a picture of
their cat or something inline in the im client, like the AIM image sending
feature.


Rich