Re: EB-lite emoticons (was Re: EB-lite feature requests)

On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, Meredydd Luff wrote:

> Right. In fact, could you hold on a little bit with this? I'm not sure that 
> this is the right way to go about emoticons. Especially considering how we're 
> hoping for multiple UIs, we had some plans for common format for emoticon 
> themes. Current thinking has an archive (ZIP file? Directory?) with an index 
> file binding strings (eg ":-)") to filenames (eg "smile.gif"). This would 
> allow us to make more specific emoticon sets for specific protocols, 
> overriding the defaults with specified string bindings and images.

I was wondering if there was a good way to do this. I definitely agree that
making as much of the emoticon code as possible generic and server based would
be a good thing. Given a choice of formats, I tend to favour using .png files
or .xpm files. PNG probably has more support in non-unix environments, although
XPM is a nice text based format (and totally trivial to embed in the
executable, the file format is valid C code).
My smileyization has come to a temporary halt anyways, while I try to figure
out the QT Designer. So far, I've found it easier to edit the .ui file by hand,
but I haven't quite worked out the XPM.GZ format.
I'll go back to studying the requirements for making new clients, for now.
It looks like it should be possible to make a fairly generic client back-end
to handle the server communications, so that a person could write up the gui
part separately. The biggest problem would be doing it in a toolkit-agnostic
way. Seeing as I want to write a Java client, this wouldn't help me much
anyways, but for everybody else it would be a good thing...

-- 
Craig West         Ph: (416) 567-1491	|  It's not a bug,
[email protected]              	|  It's a feature...