[Standards] Re: Proposed XMPP Extension: Explicit Mentions

For one, I'm of the opinion that its fundamentally the same thing to a user regardless of if I'm mentioning one or many people. It _could_ get away with just having whole new namespaces for every mention type in the 'type' attribute, but I'm not a fan of that. I'd prefer if an implementation is able to receive unknown mention types and actually know that they're mentions, which I can't do if we forego the 'kind' attribute and use new namespaces in 'type' for any extensions. Even if my client doesn't understand who the mention targets, it can still show it in the UI like any other mention, and messages might come with a button to show all of the attached mentions, which can just fall back to showing the target URI if it doesn't know what it is. Servers can also have more flexible mention-related rules if its able to tell when something is a mention, even if it doesn't know who got mentioned. No, it seems clear to me that Attention isn't the right tool for room mentions. It'd be inconsistent with every other mention type defined, and actively goes against what people want for mentions. For example, everyone agreed that there's no use-case for invisible mentions, and that 'begin'/'end' should be required. Yet, Attention is literally only capable of invisible mentions. Not to say there isn't a place for it, just that this isn't it. Its been suggested that the MUC service could attach Attention elements when sending a message stanza to a user that has been mentioned. This would be the same for all mention types, whether its room, or individual, role/affiliation, hats, or anything else the MUC understands. But even then, I've also gotten feedback that people think Attention is the wrong tool for this use-case as well. It'd depend on what we want to go for when the notification stuff splits off into its own XEP, I guess.