Custom smilies without shortcuts

[Jean La]

Hello! Version 2.5.0 added support for custom smileys, which is currently only used by MSN.
I was wondering if it would be possible to store a custom smiley without having a shortcut for it,
in order to avoid unintentionally provoking a smiley by typing text that includes the shortcut.
So I didn't submit any shortcut when saving an incoming smiley. That spawned an alert saying:
"please select an image" or something like that. Obviously this is some minor bug, either the
string is wrong in stead of "please enter a shortcut", or there should be no alert.
Because when opening the smiley editor afterwards, it was possible to select the smiley, then
clear the shortcut and save. Which is correct?
Anyway, is it a limitation of the MSN protocol that each smiley must use a shortcut?
Would the Pidgin support for custom smileys allow a future implementation (e.g.XMPP) to
not require shortcuts?
Regards,
Jean