[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

[Richard Dobson]

----- Original Message -----
From: <isomer at coders.net>
To: <jdev at jabber.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 12:26 PM
Subject: Re: [JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines


> > > 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. :)

Yep html should only ever be in the html section of the message, not
embedded into the plain text section, although there still needs to be a
solution for the plain text section and how to display the emoticons in that
(at the very least a standard textual representation for each emoticon).

>
> > 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.

Thats much better than a url to an external source, but there is still the
problem of the file format here, it should not be assumed that everyone uses
a particular image format for their emoticons.
What about this:

<img src="urn:jabber-emoticon:smilie"> alt=":-)" />

Just doing this solves many of the problems, although I still like my
solution ;-).

Rich