30 Jun
2025
30 Jun
'25
4:51 p.m.
Hi,
On Mon, 2025-06-30 at 10:49 +0100, Dave Cridland wrote:
Can we structure the XML change such that a
degradation into a single
reply works? Perhaps the first reply is as XEP-0461, but subsequent
replies are a different element (possibly can be the same namespace).
I think a multi-reply should not "degrade" into a single-reply with to
only one of the messages, as this would mean that the explicitly
intended meaning of replying to more than one message is lost entirely.
Instead the most graceful fallback is probably to instead have a
message that has 2 block-quotes to refer to the previous message (and
have those tagged with fallback indicator so they are hidden if multi-
reply is supported).
I'm possibly reading more into this statement than
you intended, but
in general we want to only bump the namespace where incompatibilities
would otherwise arrive undetected. So no namespace bump unless we
absolutely have to, but if we have to, we absolutely do it.
In this case a namespace bump is totally reasonable:
- We don't have a lot of implementations yet and the XEP is very young.
- Good fallbacks are possible for unsupporting clients
- Updated clients can temporarily send both versions at the same time
for cases that would've been supported by the old spec (single message
replies)
On Mon, 2025-06-30 at 13:43 +0000, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
I don't see how that's a problem. Order is
preserved in any case.
I believe this would be the first time we'd give meaning to the
ordering of direct child elements of stanzas. Previously, those
elements have been processed largely independent of each other.
Using a grouping element just opens us up to new fun
cases like
multiple
grouping elements.
Well, many existing XEPs don't allow for their elements to exist
multiple times and not all make that really explicit. You likely can't
(or shouldn't be able to) send multiple XEP-0353 <propose/> in a single
message or have multiple XEP-0319 <idle/> in a presence. If you do, you
end up in undefined behavior. Should we make more explicit what should
happen in those cases? Yes, certainly. But them existing multiple times
is really the only "fun case" you can come up with.
I like that the syntax matches more the semantics if you "group" them.
The message is a reply to two messages, not a message that is two
replies.
On Mon, 2025-06-30 at 13:45 +0000, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
I'm interested to see a prototype of this rnd
especially what kinds
of UX
are possible for multiple replies but no quotes.
Until then I think any discussion of XEP changes or namespace bumps
is a bit
cart before the horse.
As was mentioned by Greatsword in their initial message, there are
already non-XMPP messengers that support this, it's really not
something innovative. As this is not the first time this feature is
desired, there seems to be people interested. For reference, here's
screenshots of revolt.chat when doing replies to multiple
messages: https://imgur.com/a/6n1oiPd
Marvin