Some ideas for ways to improve the emoticons plugin.  I may write them in if I decide to continue developing it, or maybe these ideas will interest some other javascript enthusiast out there.

Context menus: Apply Emoticons and Unapply Emoticons
these would be context menus for individual messages as well as for tabs.  "Apply Emoticons" would munge a message (or the message buffer for a view) and replace emoticons with the corresponding images.  For existing <img class="emoticon"> tags, it would change the src attribute if necessary.
"Unapply Emoticons" would turn images back to the corresponding text emoticon.  This would be useful for instances when text that was not intended to be a smiley was munged.


Multiple themes: The plugin could load multiple themes.


Load Section: The plugin could load a single section from a theme, and ignore other sections.


Theme Selector Dialog: There would be a pref called 'emoticons.themesbasepath'.  Any theme directories under this location, (local only) would be added to a theme list, and could be selected with a friendly dialog box.  Note, this functionality would coexist peacefully with the current way of selecting a theme, which is to use |/pref emoticons.url| or |/emoticons|.


Use dynamic css instead of creating <img> tags for the smilies.  Just found out it's possible to change, create and delete CSS rules of an existing stylesheet with javascript.  It seems it's not possible to create a new stylesheet, so we'll have to work on that part of it.  Overall, this method would be superior to the way the emoticons are done now, because changing the CSS rule would affect all smilies in the output buffer, not just new ones as they come in.

