[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

[Julian Fitzell]

Dave wrote:
 > Okay, it's a 2 vs. 1 here ... how about if one of you echoes _my_
 > messages instead of the other's?  That should even things a bit ;-)
 >
 >  - Dave

If we're going to start counting here, you can put me down for another 
one against - I don't like sending img tags in the message.  But I feel 
like we're going in circles here.  I don't think you need to take it as 
a personal attack that others are arguing against your proposal... but 
there doesn't seem to be a lot of support for it in the messages I've 
been reading.

I personally have the following issues with it:

1) I don't like html-ish tags being stuck directly in the message tag... 
they're hard to filter out if you don't want them.  If you want to do 
this, do it in the xhtml tag where it is only dealt with by clients that 
understand images.

2) I don't like using filenames to identify an emotion.  Some picture 
that somebody thinks I want to see (maybe some nice porn) does not 
necessarily convey an emotion to me.  I want to learn what an image 
means in my client.  And I want my emoticons to have the same style and 
a style that matches my UI.  And I don't think sending relative paths in 
the SRC attribute is a good solution to this... one client may not be 
using .png files so why should it have to look for smiley.png as a key 
to display it's happyface image?

I think the simple solution is to just leave it up to the client (with a 
list of suggested emoticons to support, if desired).  This works fine 
except for the weird ones that MSN uses.

The nicest solution I've seen is the one that allows you to define "(*)" 
or ":star:" or whatever you want as being a star emoticon (is that 
really an emoticon?  no emotion there... bloody Micros*ft).  This  gives 
the following benefits:

1) the MSN transport could add the appropriate tags to messages from the 
MSN network so Jabber clients could translate it.

2) Jabber clients can use the ":star:" instead which can still be 
translated by the MSN transport (since it knows ":star:" represents the 
star emoticon), can be properly displayed (by the end user's 
preferences) in another graphical Jabber client, and reads in a way that 
makes sense for text-clients.  This also allows you to use :etoile: 
instead if you are speaking in french.  Yes I know it doesn't do the 
translation for a french speaker talking to an english speaker... but 
you know what?  If it weren't for the system they would have just had to 
say "etoile" or "star" in text in the first place.  (but please let's 
not use :luv: - one character saving is not enough for me to stare at 
that all the time)

Obvious disadvantage here is bandwidth usage for some clients.  This is 
really an issue of feature negotiation which needs to be resolved by 
other JEPs.  Obviously if you are using an x namespace here then once a 
feature negotation standard is decided you can query for support of that 
namespace.  But we have the same issue with the double inclusion of an 
<xhtml> and <message> tag in a message... all these things need to be 
able to be turned off if we want the protocol so be as small as possible 
for certain clients.

I hope we can return to some constructive discussion.  I don't even care 
much about this issue myself, but I'm getting a little tired of the 
circular conversation and "you said I said 'foo' but I didn't", "yes you 
did", etc.... that has been filling my mailbox from this thread.

Returning now to spectator mode.

Cheers,

Julian


-- 
julian at beta4.com
Beta4 Productions (http://www.beta4.com)