[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

Mon Apr 22 21:22:10 CDT 2002

---------- Original Message ----------
>Reply inline:
> - Dave

>That's a legitimate complaint - HTML is too generalized if all you want
>is a small set of standardized emoticons.  However, the buck won't stop
>there, and I can guarantee you that much.

Well, if you want to send your emoticons as XHTML there already is the xhtml 
element for you. It's meant so that you can decide how you want the message to look. 
In how far to support this is up the the makers of the clients. Emoticons is something 
else though.. they don't have to look the same on every client.. it's interpretted the way 
the developer of the client likes (and/or based on the feedback he gets from his users 
ofcourse).

>> If I look at all the discussion about it here I think the most far we could get is define 
a 
>> list of emiticons used by jabber. Clients can simply choose to support property 
clients 
>> emoticons like MSN then or not (after all you ussually know to wich gateway or 
user 
>> you send a message :)
>....so the best we can hope for, according to you, is to simply return
>to our chaos of different IM systems supporting different emoticons,
>with one added dimension - our own set of "standard" emoticons, ready
>to compete with all the other "standard" emoticons ;-P

Well what I hope we can come to is, that when we're sending emoticons from one 
jabber client to the other there is some form of standardization. For example let's not 
have that one client decides (h) is the standard icon for a heart, and the other (L). 
When sending a message to a property-IM system like MSN, the client can ofcourse 
detect this and adapt emoticons accordingly (same for receiving), but again, this is a 
decision that's in the hands of the client developers. I can imagine some outthere 
would say: I don't care about MSN, I'll just stick to jabber. I do propose however an 
element in the message indicating no emoticons should be rendered at all, and a 
mechanism for one client to tell the other it doesn't support emoticons. 

This way we'll have a diversity of clients.. so everyone can have one they like :) It's an 
easy implementation, provides for possible interoperatability with systems like Yahoo! 
and MSN (up to the developer) and no weird custom namespaces. I can have a simple 
client saying: hello :) and a more advanced client rendering it the way I like it with the 
emoticon I like. I can paste a piece of code to a friend without having weird smileys 
show up all over it. And ofcourse Dave, if you want to send me a message containing 
a wonderfull piece of XHTML with images of the some of the most beatifully rendered 
emoticons inside it you can *still* do that.. just don't forget to supply the alternative 
<body>message</body> message as well, cause not every client outthere likes to 
render XHTML.