Pavatar support forum (2007–2011)

The forum was the place to ask how to publish a Pavatar, to report implementations and to argue about the specification. Old forum addresses (/forum/…) redirect here; links to a specific thread land on its summary below when one exists.

Threads

rel="avatar" instead of rel="pavatar" (January 2007)

Started by Jeena Paradies on 6 January 2007 after an email suggested that the link relation should use the plain word avatar instead of the “made-up” pavatar. Jeena's counter-argument: the name appears three times in the protocol — the X-Pavatar header, the rel="pavatar" link and the pavatar.png file — and many sites already had unrelated images called pavatar.png, so renaming only part of it would be inconsistent. The thread grew to 18 posts over a week, with participants including factoryjoe, damnian and Johannes Zeller weighing the advantages and disadvantages of switching everything to avatar. The specification kept pavatar. Read the archived thread.

Cross integration between Pavatar and Gravatar (November 2008)

Posted by schultzter (Montreal) on 7 November 2008. Two proposals: use the neutral term avatar everywhere (X-avatar, rel="avatar", avatar.png), and let a Pavatar point to a Gravatar by using a mailto: address plus a hash method, so that the consumer could compute the Gravatar URL itself. The post argued that a specification (Pavatar) and a service (Gravatar) should complement each other. Read the archived thread.

Other topics

Later threads included OpenID integration (July 2008), generating an avatar from a laptop webcam (February 2008) and announcements of new plugins. The forum index from August 2008 lists them all.

Back to the Pavatar archive.