On 17 Mar 2026, at 15:23, Marvin W. via Standards <standards@xmpp.org> wrote:
On Tue, 2026-03-17 at 10:01 -0500, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
You mention people without any indication in the body that you mentioned them in Slack?? How?
The other way round. I mention "@B" in a message to user A or a channel where B is not a member, and it will be a mention in markup without a notification of A. And with things like "@here" you are also notifying a lot of users without mentioning them in the traditional sense. (The @here also doesn't become clickable whereas a @B actually will be a link to the profile of B).
A variation of this also happens a lot on Discord where you have the split notions of mentioning a person with ping and mentioning a person without ping.
Right. Which is what the existing refrences XEP would already allow (with the small, previously-discussed edit to not restrict the URI on mentions to URIs of bare JIDs)
Except for all the other issues it has, like unclear interplay with XEP-0393/0394, lack of support for multi language messages, ... It also has the major downside of specifying a bunch of other things than mentions that are unfinished (have literal TODOs) and don't have any implementation experience and likely never will - meaning it can't be reasonably advanced to stable. The only way I see XEP-0372 advance is if everything except mention is removed - in which case we have to ask the question why it would still be called "references", if the only thing it does is "mentions”.
FWIW, 372 is used and deployed for things other than mentions, e.g. files and pubsub items. I do agree there’s a bunch in there that needs tidying up - there was a PR that tidied some things up, but did many things in one go, some of which I didn’t agree with. /K