17 Mar
2026
17 Mar
'26
1:17 p.m.
On Tue, 2026-03-17 at 11:36 -0500, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
Well partly because I don't think we want b
without a to be a thing
you can do. But also because it's so cheap to have begin/end
attributes. If the app also supports other ways of doing a it can
consider them redundant.
Can you explain why you don't want to be able to do (b) without (a)? I
fail to see a good reason why this shouldn't be possible. If you really
don't want to support it in a client, you can easily require on the
recipient that (a) is present for (b) to work, no matter if it's the
same element conveying it or a different one.
As I already mentioned, there is advantages of splitting the two in
distinct elements (unrelated to them being in the same or different
XEPs), because (b) can be useful for server-side processing (which will
likely not look into the body or analyze begin/end attributes even if
present), when (a) is directly tied to the body and thus should be
encrypted when possible and has to take care of the multi-language
shenanigans. The ProtoXEP's <noping/> actually has the issue that for
multi language there are multiple occasions of the <mention>, so the
<noping/> can be present on some languages and missing on others.
Marvin