[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

[David Iodice]

here's something to ponder:

emoticons can be viewed as a special case of a more generic
capability.  Let's call it "jabsters" (c).  In essence a
jabster is a textual description that has a meaning
different from the text itself -- a "short cut" if you will.
Emoticons are one example, all of the other little acronyms
like BTW, IANAL, TIA, RTFM are short cuts too (but they
aren't emoticons).  If I type BTW, what can't it come up as
"By the way" on the other client?

I suggest that we have a more generalized format to
accommodate other short-cut uses.  We also need a mechanism
to identify which jabster "sets" are available on each
client (a capabilities exchange).  We don't want one person
typing LOL on a client assuming it will come out as
"laughing out loud"  and the other client uses a different
jabster set that translates LOL to "lots of luck".

A more esoteric application can be for the non-tradition IM,
like from human-to-device.  Perhaps I want to IM my coffee
machine and say "Turn On".  The coffee machine could see
this as a jabster and translate it to the relevant command
string for the device.  Here the jabster is a translation
from a human readable command to a device command.

Similar to emoticons?  I think so.  So when we finalize how
we want to handle emoticons, lets also think about the more
generic case and perhaps cover it, too while we are at it.