[JDEV] Emoticons/transports

[Michael Brown]

> Transport translating/transforming of messages: if I'd be maintining one
of the
> transports, the last thing I would care about is translating of emoticans,
the
> transports job is to route the message, not interpretate it. Even if you
do make it to
> some kind of standard I think transport maintainers will agree with me on
this one.
> That "silly regexp-matching kludge" does not belong in a transport ;) (So
no I do not
> think it's a transports job to make other networks "look the same to the
client as
> native Jabber users". Their job is to route messages and precense into the
jabber
> network.

Are you serious?  Maybe I missed the whole point of Transports, but my
understanding was that they were for exactly that: translating Jabber (XML
based) messages into the native format of the system that it was designed to
support.  The whole philosophy was (I thought) to make all user accounts
look like native Jabber users to the Jabber client so the clients could
remain light and simple.

I know for my client, I don't want to have to put code in that says: if I am
talking to an MSN user, use this set of emoticon tags, and if I am talking
to an ICQ user use this set of emoticon tags etc...

Now, maybe the transport developers might think that emoticons are a stupid
concept, and not worth the coding time.  That may be true, but I personally
think that for systems that use them heavily (such as MSN) it would be well
worth supporting the translation, so that we (the Jabber community) don't
end up with a defacto Microsoft standard.

Michael.