[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

[Dave]

Reply inline:

 - Dave

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).
If encoding emoticon references into the plain text section of a message
is okay, I see no reason why including a proper XML element defining an
emoticon shouldn't be okay.  However, as I said before, I'm starting to
lean more and more towards the idea of using real, honest, XML elements
to denote emoticons, because the more I talk about the HTML IMG tag, the
more people complain that "emoticons are not images; they're seperate
entities."  If they indeed are seperate entities, I think they deserve
a much more important position than a silly regexp-matching kludge in
the text of a message.

> 
> >
> > > 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.
Web servers can supply different image formats to different clients.
Many web servers already do just that, and others (like Apache) can
easily be reconfigured to do it.

> What about this:
> 
> <img src="urn:jabber-emoticon:smilie"> alt=":-)" />
That's the URN extension of a format-agnostic image name.  (I believe
I pointed out a similar proposal in another message.)

> 
> Just doing this solves many of the problems, although I still like my
> solution ;-).
No comment. . .

> 
> Rich
Dave

> 
> 
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