[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

[Dave]

Reply inline:

 - Dave

"Thomas Parslow (PatRat)" wrote:
> 
> > Okay, now before you read my response to a previous message (which
> > answers all your concerns), can anybody come up with any more problems
> > with the HTML IMG tag approach?  That was certainly a rather major salvo
> > of bashing you folks put up ;-P
> 
> >  - Dave
> 
> It's just way more complicated then it needs to be. It creates
> security problems which the rest of Jabber has been designed to
> prevent. And it requires people to upload emoticons they want to use
> or rely on sort of central store.
What security problems are created?
Also, if we're going to use a set of "standard" emoticons, we're also
limiting people to a set of "standard" emoticons, but we're not even
giving them the option of rolling out their own :-(

> 
> All an emoticon system needs to do is replace certain pieces of text
> (such as ":)") with brightly colored friendly little graphics,
Any client can already do that by itself, with no support needed from
the Jabber protocol suite.

> why
> add a requirement for each client to have to connect to a web site and
> download them for each message?
There is no such requirement, if you use a SRC attribute with a relative
URL.  In fact, clients can always just use the text in the ALT attribute,
and forget about the images.

> 
> IMHO, no extra protocol enhancements are needed,
Hmm. . .

> although it would
> possibly be useful to define a standard set (I'm not really convinced
> even this is needed but it wouldn't hurt).
It _would_ hurt, because it'd mean involving the Jabber protocol in
a standard it has no authority over, and indeed, _should have no_
authority over.

> 
> Also, as has already been mentioned, most clients will probably want
> to provide they're own emoticon graphics which fit in with the rest of
> the UI.
Nothing in the HTML IMG tag spec prevents clients from using their own
graphics, especially if relative URLs are used in the SRC attributes of
the IMG tags.

> 
> Thomas Parslow (PatRat)
> E-Mail/Jabber: tom at almostobsolete.net
> ICQ: 26359483
> 
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