Custom smilies without shortcuts

[Marcus Lundblad]

tis 2008-08-26 klockan 14:14 -0700 skrev 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

Hello.

This is the way it works in the MSN protocol.
The message itself is sent as the text. Then the smileys are sent as
"objects", where the objects are associated with a string.
The current implementation in libpurple is oriented in this way too.
Theoretically custom smileys on XMPP using XHTML-IM in conjunction with
binary objects (XEP-0231) wouldn't need to automatically substitute a
shortcut string with an image. But this is the way it is done with the
current patch (that I have written) and this is also how it is supported
in libpurple (actually GTKIMHTML, the widget that Pidgin uses to display
messages), that smileys are added using their strings, kinda like
"extending" the default smiley theme.
I also think it is good idea that it would work the same way for both
XMPP and MSN accounts.

BTW, you could always choose a string that is less likely to appear "by
accident". I usually assing something like "(word)". For a smiley
representing "word". This way it doesn't come up every time I type a
specific word... :)

//Marcus

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