On 21.08.2011 16:18, Jehan Pagès wrote: > 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. > Some general notes here: Just like XEP-0054, XEP-0292 does NOT specify a way to do avatars. It maps vCard4 to XMPP and is huge step forward from the unfinished, strange XML representation of vCard we had before. It does however map PHOTO (which IMHO is specifically not an Avatar, since avatars do not necessarily show a photo of the account owner) and LOGO (which might be closer to an avatar...). At any rate I dislike the idea of restricting our use of vCard4 to remove potentially large data.
Personally I'd like to see us moving from XEP-0054/XEP-0153 to a XEP-0292/XEP-0084 combination, where the former is just vCard and the later avatar. BTW I'm among those that would prefer using just PEP for vCard4. Having one node for the hash and one for the actual data. You can still get the vCard with an appropriate item fetching IQ and MEP is something it would be nice to see move forward anyway. > 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). > Personally I'd really like my avatar node to have a "presence" access-model. I think what you might be really advocating here is having more configurability for PEP nodes. I think we might need a PubSub profile that allows more configurability in terms of who may see what data (this is quite interesting in terms of most social networking related work too). -- Florob
