The_Tick's Rawr

Emoticon pack standardization

So I got to thinking, a little while back. Making emoticon packs suck.

a lot

And I figured out why. Each clients format is different. You have to make a format that works for your client, and for most apps, that's whatever you think up.

Then I thought, what if these formats were all the same :D

So here it goes, what I have been working on for the past week.

Emoticon Pack Standardization

It's not a lot. Most of the packs I read are similar. I read the Adium, Fire, Kopete, Gaim, and Proteus packs, and concluded that they are mostly the same. With the exception of Gaim, they all use a xml or xml like format. Gaim uses a flat file format.

What I've made so far is the following. Comments are welcome:

Emoticons format rough draft

It'll be like this:

folder/files

With all the files in the folder. All one would have to do is change the folder name to be compatible with clients using this format :D

It's still kinda rough, but in the end I think it works. I used the apple format for plists because Apple clients can use their api's to access and process the file much faster this way, and I do not believe (I could be wrong of course) that the file will be slower to parse on linux or windows or bsd or beos clients.

Once a format is decided upon by all parties, then we can move on to implementation. I'd really like for a app to create emoticons to be created on each platform. The Fire project already has such an app, so that'll help out there.

Comments are welcome, minus flames of course. Cheers.

Oh, and if anyone has a better format, please let me know

Posted by tick at July 8, 2004 07:40 PM