[jdev] Re: Image transfer in chat ?

[Richard Dobson]

>>I don't agree, that the Jabber way is defined by discoing and 
>>file-transferring everything. There are arguments for carrying images in 
>>the same message. Embedding images works equally well as embedding images 
>>by URL into MIME mails. They have a half-life period and after some time 
>>the external images disappear. If you want to archive complete messages 
>>with out the risk of loosing images, then the image data must be in the 
>>message.
> I agree with Heiner, archiving messages which contain inline images as 
> data inside the SRC attribute, preserves the image data. Otherwise image 
> data might get lost.

There is no reason you couldnt use the hashing method when sending the 
message but then when archiving it alter the message to embed it in this way 
so you get the best of both worlds, you dont waste bandwidth by sending 
images when you dont need to and you also dont force the images on someone 
who might not want them (i.e. a mobile device), if we do allow the full 
embedding method then we will have to require discoing the recipient to see 
if they will accept embedded images, sending them to a mobile device could 
end up very expensive for the recipient and very bad if they cant even 
render them in the first place, its common courtesy to give them the option 
of not wanting them, which the hashing solution solves completely.

> I do agree with Richard, too. Transferring the encoded image data inline 
> in an HTML-IMG tag could waste bandwidth.
> The hashing helps in this case.

Yup

Richard