[JDEV] Emoticons: guidelines

[Dave]

Reply inline:

 - Dave

David Sutton wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
>    I don't believe it is, for a number of reasons
> 
> * In order to do this, the transport would have to scan and rewrite 
> every message passing both into the jabber network and out of it. 
> Imagine this on a high traffic transport, such as on jabber.org.
The purpose of the transport is to behave like a Jabber server on one
end, and like a foreign client/server on the other end.  If the rules for
talking to a regular Jabber server and talking to each type of transport
are different, you'll be loading clients with tons of unneeded translation
code, and (for the reason I mentioned earlier - aim.dave.tj may not be an
AIM-t after all, but rather a real Jabber server) the translation is only
based on heuristics and can therefore be quite wrong.  A protocol based
on something as elegant as XML shouldn't force clients to do something
as ugly as guessing what kind of foreign network they're talking to.
It's just plain yucky :-(

> 
> * If the client performs the translation, you have the ability to easily 
> turn off the translation. If the transport does the translation, then 
> you have to filter and translate all the information back to normal if 
> you want to turn off emoticon support. You may wish to do this for many 
> reasons such as someone wanting to send you source code which would get 
> parts turned into emoticons (especially from other networks)
The problem with other networks is that they have no way of turning
emoticons off, so if you're chatting with those types of networks, you
have to expect that your stuff is going to get turned into emoticons
whether you want to or not.  Given that fact, turning off the translation
(i.e., sending raw XML elements to the MSN network) makes no sense
whatsoever.

> 
> * People become suspicious when "middlemen" start rewriting their 
> messages for them, such as transports.
The Jabber server rewrites your packets already, so why not let it also
rewrite your actual text in order to translate it between systems?

> 
> Regards,
> 
>    David
> ---
> David Sutton / Peregrine
> 
> 
> Michael Brown wrote:
> >>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.
> > 
> > 
> > This should be done at the transport level I think.  Users on transports
> > should look the same to the client as native Jabber users.  (Isn't that the
> > point of transports?)
> > 
> > Michael.
> > 
> > 
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> 
> 
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