[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

[isomer at coders.net]

> > 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'm a "for" :)

> 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.

This sounds fine to me, doing it inside a xhtml tag. :)

> 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?

So why not use URN's?  <img src="urn:jabber-emoticon:smilie.png"
alt=":-)" />  Nothing is fetched from anywhere, clients have an internal
table of emoticons.

-- 
mummy, n.: An Egyptian who was pressed for time.