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XHTML Emoticons in Jabber
Jabber already supports XHTML as a protocol, and many clients have adopted its use for text formatting. Using IMG elements instead of Jabber X-Tag elements makes alot more sense since nothing special has to be done to display the icons, they would come naturally to XHTML-supporting clients.
Definition
The icons are defined in the XHTML body by using simple XHTML IMG elements. This keep the implimentations standard with the W3C and allows any existing XHTML GUI widgets to be used.
Example XMPP Message:
<message>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<body>I'm so happy <img
src="http://emoticons.jabber.org/standard/3/smiley.png"
alt=":-)"/>! I drink <img
src="http://emoticons.jabber.org/standard/3/mug.png"
alt="[beer]"/>.</body>
</html>
<body>I'm so happy :-)! I drink beer.</body>
</message>
Issues
- Lightweight: It has been said that keeping the convention as small as possible is the best way to go, and therefore should not use XML within the messages because XML is verbose and excessive. Well, "premature optimisation is the root of all evil". Trying to reduce the amount of bandwidth used in the XMPP protocol at this point is not worth while, since we already use XML, and we can always compress the streams of data using zlib for instance.
- Translation: How should the icons be translated into messages for foriegn systems such as AIM or MSN? Should the client or the Transport do it? If the client does, how would it know what to do to it? Currently the Transports do not support XHTML bodies (is this correct? -- Theo), so perhaps this is a moot point.
Background
This proposal was not created by Theo, even though his name is on it. Who created this is lost to time once it was migrated over from an older version of the Theoretic website. My apologies to the original author.
