[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

Tue Apr 23 15:58:36 CDT 2002

If we want emoticons to be a distinct entity which is _not_ the same
as images, the correct way to do it in XML is to define a namespace and
use elements of the appropriate types.  Telling clients that they must
mangle the actual text returned by the XML parser in order to figure out
what text they should delete and replace with images is just plain silly,
because it doesn't provide the clean implementation achievable with HTML,
and it doesn't provide the clean design achievable with real XML.

 - Dave

Tijl Houtbeckers wrote:
> 
> ---------- Original Message ----------
> >Reply inline:
> > - Dave
> 
> >That's a legitimate complaint - HTML is too generalized if all you want
> >is a small set of standardized emoticons.  However, the buck won't stop
> >there, and I can guarantee you that much.
> 
> Well, if you want to send your emoticons as XHTML there already is the xhtml 
> element for you. It's meant so that you can decide how you want the message to look. 
> In how far to support this is up the the makers of the clients. Emoticons is something 
> else though.. they don't have to look the same on every client.. it's interpretted the way 
> the developer of the client likes (and/or based on the feedback he gets from his users 
> ofcourse).
> 
> >> If I look at all the discussion about it here I think the most far we could get is define 
> a 
> >> list of emiticons used by jabber. Clients can simply choose to support property 
> clients 
> >> emoticons like MSN then or not (after all you ussually know to wich gateway or 
> user 
> >> you send a message :)
> >....so the best we can hope for, according to you, is to simply return
> >to our chaos of different IM systems supporting different emoticons,
> >with one added dimension - our own set of "standard" emoticons, ready
> >to compete with all the other "standard" emoticons ;-P
> 
> Well what I hope we can come to is, that when we're sending emoticons from one 
> jabber client to the other there is some form of standardization.
> For example let's not 
> have that one client decides (h) is the standard icon for a heart, and the other (L). 
> When sending a message to a property-IM system like MSN, the client can ofcourse 
> detect this and adapt emoticons accordingly (same for receiving), but again, this is a 
> decision that's in the hands of the client developers. I can imagine some outthere 
> would say: I don't care about MSN, I'll just stick to jabber. I do propose however an 
> element in the message indicating no emoticons should be rendered at all, and a 
> mechanism for one client to tell the other it doesn't support emoticons. 
> 
> This way we'll have a diversity of clients.. so everyone can have one they like :) It's an 
> easy implementation, provides for possible interoperatability with systems like Yahoo! 
> and MSN (up to the developer) and no weird custom namespaces. I can have a simple 
> client saying: hello :) and a more advanced client rendering it the way I like it with the 
> emoticon I like. I can paste a piece of code to a friend without having weird smileys 
> show up all over it. And ofcourse Dave, if you want to send me a message containing 
> a wonderfull piece of XHTML with images of the some of the most beatifully rendered 
> emoticons inside it you can *still* do that.. just don't forget to supply the alternative 
> <body>message</body> message as well, cause not every client outthere likes to 
> render XHTML.
> 
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