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