Emoticon Skins

Emoticons are the "smiley faces" and other icons used by end users to express emotion or simply be creative within email and instant messaging conversations.

Traditionally, emoticons have been typed and displayed as ASCII art, but the recent trend of using graphics instead of text to represent these emoticons will be followed in this project. Additionally, the term "icon" will be used instead of "emoticon" for purposes of convenience and keeping the specification open for future uses.

Specification

This project standardizes the use of multimedia emoticons to prevent confusion and conflicting conventions, increasing their usefulness to end users. This will also allow client developers to spend saved time, effort, and money on more important parts of their programs.

All icons are created by defining their metadata (such as the text strings used to create them and URIs to multimedia files), and then grouping them into files. These metadata and associated multimedia files, are called "icon skins". Icon Skins may be traded and shared among users of all supporting clients similar to skins for WinAmp, XMMS, GNOME, and other customizable applications. This creates a platform-independent system, providing a great degree of customization for the user, and allowing client developers to focus on other features.

Icon Definition File

Each icon in a skin is defined and grouped together in an XML document called the Icon Definition File.

Packaging

How the Icon Skin must be packaged together.

Jabber Discovery

Explains how clients of the Jabber network should query for Icon Skins support from other entities.

Jabber Registrar Considerations

Explains what actions the Jabber Registrar should take to manage Icon Skins.

IANA Considerations

Explains what actions should be taken with the IANA for them to support Icon Skins.

Issues

The Unresolved Issue Tracker is where the community formally proposes and discusses changes to the Icon Skins project.