[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

Mon Apr 22 16:11:31 CDT 2002

Dave wrote:

>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 ;-)
>
Another option would be to use namespaces to embed another type of data 
within the message, i.e.

<message to="dave at dave.tj"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/rec-xhtml" xmlns:ex='emoticon-namespace'>This is a <ex:message/> containing <ex:two-emoticons/>.</html></message>

But this has the disadvantage of not being visible on non-emoticized 
clients <ex:smiley/>.

-David Waite