So, I would like to discuss the realities and intricansies of implementing stickers in XMPP. I've come up with a very simplicistic draft that assumes there's a central authority that hosts stickers and controls their availability and namespaces.

In a nutshell:

<message
    from="[email protected]"
    to="[email protected]"
    type="chat">
  <sticker xmlns="http://jabber.zeonfederated.com/protocol/stickers"
      uid="pusheen.halloween.pumpkin" />
</message>

Would be a sticker-message wherein the UID means the organization/artist "pusheen", sticker pack "halloween" and sticker identified by "pumpkin", and would get translated by the receiving client into a HTTP asset URL. (The reason I decided not to send URLs in the first place is to prevent displaying random received URLs that could be malicious and also allowing to change the hosting place of the stickers without breaking history)

Is this viable? Is this okay? Could other clients potentially adopt support for this?

Another question is of course who gets to manage and host the inventory of stickers.

If you're asking yourself - who needs stickers? For enterprise usage, I suppose nobody; although my chats with my boss often involve an exchange of cute stickers that makes the whole thing quite fun. It's no secret though that a lot of normal, not technically-arcane people are attracted to cute stickers. They are essentially the sole reason the messaging app LINE took off at all.

Feedback and discussion welcome.