[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

[Julian Fitzell]

Richard Dobson wrote:
> ----- 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 ;-).

Sure, but then in either case why are we using an <img> tag?  Sure we 
can use a tag called <img> if we want, but why not an x tag with an 
appropriate namespace?  This doesn't save any bandwidth and now the 
client can't use and HTML widget to display XHTML messages because it 
won't understand the URN...

Julian

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