Re: [Last-Call] New Version Notification for draft-crocker-inreply-react-07.txt

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

In article <[e-mail]> you write:
>On 2/26/2021 2:54 PM, John Levine wrote:
>> At this point I don't see any compelling reason to limit the reactions
>> to Unicode emoji and exclude text reactions like :-( ...

>Which means that the data in that body-part can be anything, since 
>there's no obvious way to restrict it.

Yup.

>For example something like the common mechanism of showing the symbol 
>and then putting a count next to it, for the number of responses that 
>were received using it, does not work if the 'symbol' can be a long 
>string of arbitrary text.

It only works if there's a small controlled vocabulary, but it doesn't
matter what the vocabulary is.  There are over 3500 Unicode emoji
and exponentially more if you add modifiers like skin tone, so that's
not very controlled either.

>That level of data flexibility is likely to make MUA design choices
>pretty limited, which in turn might limit the utility of the mechanism.

I think we all agree that we are not very good at guessing what MUAs
will do or what UI will turn out to be more or less successful. The
recent discussion with Patrik tells us that trying to pick a small
universal set of emoji won't work. Let the reaction be whatever people
want to send, and if MUAs find, e.g., they feature the same set of
reactions as in some popular IM system, they can do so without asking
us for permission.

R's,
John