Hi, I am looking more closely to avatars. Right now, we have 4 specifications (more?) that can carry avatars: - XEP-0008: obsolete; - XEP-0054/XEP-0153: vcard-based (vcard-temp), historic; - XEP-0084: PEP-based; draft; - XEP-0292: vcard4-based, and a part PEP.
Ok so I won't speak about XEP-0008. I think it is dead and too basic. Still I see 2 issues I'd like to raise: 1/ Now we still have 3 protocols! XEP-0153 seems to still be the most used of them all, though it looks like at term, it should be replaced by XEP-0084. Or am I wrong? Is is safe to assume, if you had to choose, then you must implement XEP-0084 instead of 0153? And what about the brand new XEP-0292? Shouldn't we begin to stick to some protocol and improve it instead of constantly create new protocols? Because avatars in XMPP are a real mess. And this vcard-4 is not on the path to improve this fact. If I were to choose, I would prefer the PEP protocol to the vcard4 protocol. That's not to say not to use vcard4 otherwise, but remove any examples about avatars in XEP-0292, and add a note inside to say that use of vcard for saving avatar is now deprecated and XEP-0084 is preferred. Also, to add to the mess, I see vcard-4 has a PHOTO and a LOGO properties with basically description which I find totally similar! 2/ As I said, I think anyway XEP-0084 is nicer. But I see PEP has a default access-model of "presence" (section 5 of XEP-0163). While in many case, that could be more secure, for an avatar though, I would say a default of "open" would be the best (for this specific avatar node, not necessarily for any PEP node). My use case is simple: basically replace gravatar or any similar centralized attempts. If we want to be able to do so, avatars should be accessible without having presence. Any service which has itself some JID (hence able to connect to the federation) should be able to subscribe without being a contact. First because we don't want to have dozen of bots in our roster, for all the services we visited sometimes only once (but still think it is nice to display one's avatar there); and also because a "normal" pubsub subscription is actually much more powerful than a +notify presence. The presence "auto-subscription" basically asks to always get notified each time you send your presence. That's ok for one's roster, but if we begin to have a lot of service subscribing to one's avatar, it is much more efficient for the service to store your avatar, and simply get notified each time it is changed, without ever having to query again (I mean: querying when it is useless. The service query the new avatar only when it received a notification of change. Compared to something like gravatar, where you constantly query by http an avatar each time you display it, that's extremely efficient). Thanks. Jehan
