[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

[Dave Turner]

On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 04:21:22PM -0400, Dave wrote:
> That was my other original idea (take a peek at my first post on this
> subject, a few days ago).  However, the sender may want a little more
> control over the interpretation of his message, and having the receiving
> client decide those regexps takes that control away from the sender

That was my intention.  I agreed with your initial post.  I actually
prefer the way that AIM, for example, transmits it's emoticons as
commonly recognised ascii and then the receiver, if it supports it,
interprets them and inlays the images.

I'd rather define how I look at the data coming to me than the sender.
The sender should describe WHAT the data is not HOW it should be viewed.


> That whole question is moot if you're using an existing standard (like
> HTML IMG tags), rather than stewing your own kludge: web browsers are

At least with the IMG tag I guess you can use the 'alt' attribute to give
a text alternative which I could settle for.


If the general aim is to format the output at the receiver end, how about
XSLT?  Then the receiver has ultimate control over formatting, the data
that is transmitted is suitably marked up to describe the content, and the
sender can recommend a particular display format for the data.


-- 
Dave Turner
http://figroll.com/