here's something to ponder: emoticons can be viewed as a special case of a more generic capability. Let's call it "jabsters" (c). In essence a jabster is a textual description that has a meaning different from the text itself -- a "short cut" if you will. Emoticons are one example, all of the other little acronyms like BTW, IANAL, TIA, RTFM are short cuts too (but they aren't emoticons). If I type BTW, what can't it come up as "By the way" on the other client?
I suggest that we have a more generalized format to accommodate other short-cut uses. We also need a mechanism to identify which jabster "sets" are available on each client (a capabilities exchange). We don't want one person typing LOL on a client assuming it will come out as "laughing out loud" and the other client uses a different jabster set that translates LOL to "lots of luck". A more esoteric application can be for the non-tradition IM, like from human-to-device. Perhaps I want to IM my coffee machine and say "Turn On". The coffee machine could see this as a jabster and translate it to the relevant command string for the device. Here the jabster is a translation from a human readable command to a device command. Similar to emoticons? I think so. So when we finalize how we want to handle emoticons, lets also think about the more generic case and perhaps cover it, too while we are at it. _______________________________________________ jdev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.jabber.org/listinfo/jdev
