Subject: RE: [Simple] comments on rpids-01 (general, vCard, predictive)

From: Adam Roach <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 08:47:11 -0500

> > Again, commercial instant messaging systems, in my 
> experience, don't use
> > presentity-provided icons to express a presentity's current 
> state in a
> > watcher's buddylist screen. Apps might have predefined 
> icons corresponding
> > to, say, your <category> state as given in rpids-00, but I 
> don't think I've
> > seen user-supplied versions of those icons to date. The 
> whole value of these
> 
> See GAIM above, albeit provided by the watcher, given the lack of 
> protocol support.

I'm really going to have to agree strongly with Jon here.
Allowing the presentity to provide icons to represent any
kind of state -- and especially presence state -- is going
to result in nothing but an inscrutable mish-mash of angry
fruit salad in your buddy-list window.

It would be a real black eye if all or even most SIMPLE-based
IM systems ended up being thematically similar to the typical
poorly-designed amateur web page that consists primarily of
jarringly mismatched graphics found elsewhere on the web.

/a

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From: Jonathan Rosenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 20:26:20 -0400

> jarringly mismatched graphics found elsewhere on the web.

Why is a presentity supplied image fundamentally bad when a presentity 
supplied note is not? Both can be inaccurate, both can be too long, 
both can have garbage (one person I know routinely inserts seemingly 
random URIs to web pages he thinks are funny....). How is the media 
fundamentally changing things?

-Jonathan R.

-- 
Jonathan D. Rosenberg, Ph.D.                600 Lanidex Plaza
Chief Technology Officer                    Parsippany, NJ 07054-2711
dynamicsoft
[email-masked]                     FAX:   (973) 952-5050
http://www.jdrosen.net                      PHONE: (973) 952-5000
http://www.dynamicsoft.com

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From: Jonathan Rosenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2003 20:26:20 -0400

-Jonathan R.

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From: Ben Campbell <[email-masked]>
Date: 15 Jul 2003 04:08:22 -0500

>From a user interface perspective, I have to concur. The whole point of
icons representing state is to give me a quick visual way to determine
that state. This only works if the icons are consistent. If every
presentity I watch uses a different set of icons, then they are useless
to me for that purpose. They become nothing but vanity plates for the
presentities, or worse, a form of advertising. (In the same sense, I
consider HTML favicons to be evil.)

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From: Ben Campbell <[email-masked]>
Date: 15 Jul 2003 04:08:22 -0500

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From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 05:15:34 -0400

> consider HTML favicons to be evil.)

I don't see why we need to mandate UI preferences. Sure, you should have 
the possibility of turning off favicons (or RPIDS icons), but they work 
well enough to be considered useful by people who build browsers that 
didn't have to implement them. I think noting that UA UIs should allow 
turning them off is a reasonable statements.

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From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 05:15:34 -0400