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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>First, I agree about the backwards compatability
and using public xml storage currently, that thought hit me just as I was
hitting send of my previous post. Next, MNG was dropped only because
people always say: "What's MNG?" It's intent was to provide a more
open animation choice over GIF. If we want to bring it back that's fine,
but it still is lacking in many library implementations (although I'm sure that
will change quickly).</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>--temas</FONT></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=jens@mooseyard.com href="mailto:jens@mooseyard.com">Jens Alfke</A>
</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=jdev@jabber.org
href="mailto:jdev@jabber.org">jdev@jabber.org</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Friday, August 31, 2001 12:04
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> Re: [JDEV] Buddy Icon (Avatar)
Proposal</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>On Friday, August 31, 2001, at 02:15 AM, Sebastiaan 'CBAS'
Deckers wrote:<BR><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE>What color depths should be allowed?<BR></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>I'm not
aware of any rendering implementations that have problems with different color
depths. Everything should just get dithered if necessary, right? (This seems
like it's mostly an issue for non-PCs, i.e. PDAs, since I can't imagine many
desktop computers still use less than 16-bit color. Still, dithering RGB color
down to one-bit pixels is hardly rocket science.)<BR><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE>Where's the bitmap support? You allow PNG but not BMP, doesn't
seem right.<BR></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>All of these formats are bitmaps, just with
different bit depths and compression schemes. All I know about BMP is that
it's a venerable DOS file format, but what does it bring to the table that
GIF/JPEG/PNG don't?<BR><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE>Why not use scalable graphics? Or if that's too much of a
hassle, why not<BR>have multiple sizes of the same icon
available?<BR></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>With scalable graphics I think the issue would
be cross-platform rendering support. I think Flash is currently the most
compatible vector format (but is there an X-windows implementation?) Adobe has
SVG viewer plug-ins for a number of platforms but I don't know how easy they
are to integrate into applications other than web browsers. And of course
there's PDF, which is trivial to render on Mac OS X but probably more
difficult on other platforms :-)<BR><BR>These would be nice as an option but
we can hardly make it a requirement. Many people will want to grab a picture
from a webcam or digital camera and import it as their buddy icon, which
implies a bitmap format.<BR><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE>You dropped MNG support, but is it ok to use animated GIF's?
AVI/MPEG<BR>animations? (sounds? :-) )<BR></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>Animations would be
interesting. Definitely too obnoxious if they were always playing in your
buddy list, but I could imagine the animation playing only while you moused
over the icon, or in a chat window when a new message from that person
appeared. GIF89 is very compatible and fairly compact. AVI/MPEG/QuickTime/etc.
are all probably too large to be practical.<BR><BR>Sounds could be very useful
if they were used as message alerts: whenever you get an IM from me (in a new
thread) you hear my voice saying "Message from Jens!" (As a bonus this would
teach people how to pronounce my name...) Uncompressed 8-bit 5KHz audio
(telephone quality) runs 5kbytes/sec, which is OK for an announcement, and
various codecs can make that even smaller.<BR><BR>To provide multiple types
(including multiple pixel sizes of image types) we need a way for the receiver
to find which types are available and to be able to request a specific type.
The latter can be satisfied by storing each type in a separate sub-namespace
(e.g. 'jaber:iq:avatar:gif-48' for a 48x48 GIF) but without browse capability
on the server you don't get the former. Perhaps that's acceptable degradation,
though.<BR><BR>Thoughts?<BR><BR><?fontfamily><?param Marker Felt><?color><?param 0000,5151,0101><?bigger><?bigger><?bigger>—Jens<?/bigger><?/bigger><?/bigger><?/color><?/fontfamily></BLOCKQUOTE></BODY></HTML>