11 Mar
2026
11 Mar
'26
12:49 p.m.
Hi,
On 2026/03/11, snit via Standards wrote:
This was something I'd meant to include in the
original proposal, and have added to my current working draft. Special characters like
'@' MAY be sent in the original message, perhaps to show unsupporting clients that
this was a mention. But implementations SHOULD include such characters within the range
covered by the mention, so that both "user" and "@user" mentions can
be formatted the same way. I haven't special-cased any characters in particular, as
maybe rooms will use '#', or a different client might format it as
"user," to look similar to existing clients. I hope that makes sense.
I think the MAY is unnecessary here, i dont think the spec should make any recommendation
how the plaintext of a mention should look like. The sentence is just an example of
something that could happen on the wire and how to handle it.
On Wed, Mar 11, 2026, at 02:43, Maxime Buquet wrote:
Please don't. Really don't clutter XMPP with
yet another special-cased
character. We have XML for that already.
The "@", or any other character for that matter, can be used
client-side and stripped when being sent. It's easy enough to come with
UX to handle this.
Non-supporting clients won't support "@" any more than they support this
specification. It actually hurts these clients more as they may not
match on the special char and thus miss the mention entirely (for
example matching on the nick as a lone word, not part of another word or
the like).
Im not sure i understand your goal. A client needs to provide a plaintext representation
of a mention. I bet many clients do different things. Gajim includes "nickname,
", but its configurable by the user, it could also be "nickname:" and
another client could do "@nickname".
I agree that the XEP does not need to make a recommendation about how plaintext looks,
thats what the range is for. But i dont understand your statement that a client can strip
an @ for its plaintext representation. Can Gajim also strip ", " ? Or another
client ":" after the nickname? And why should it? Is there a correct
representation for a plaintext mention? Why is @ more wrong than a colon? Why would you
care if you implement mention?
Regards
Philipp