Hi Flow and all, On Tue, 2026-08-25 at 11:46 +0200, Daniel Gultsch wrote:
c) XEP-0134: Add guideline against context-dependent elements https://github.com/xsf/xeps/pull/1558
While discussing this in Council, I found that the current wording is a little fuzzy on the intent. I think everyone can agree that the example shows something that we usually want to avoid: re-use of a QName but with different semantics and thus also different syntax requirements based on context. However, when the semantics are largely the same, I personally believe context-dependent requirements are sensible. An example for this would be XEP-0446, which describes an element that is meant to be used in different context and which even explicitly says that depending on the context there might be requirement on the children required. In that sense, this new "Avoid Context-Dependent Element Definitions" guideline also to some degree contradicts the "Modular is better" guideline. I believe what you want to say is that the semantic meaning of elements with identical QName should not vary wildly based on the context (e.g. the same QName should not be used to announce feature support and request a server action). This IMO even holds when they don't have different syntax requirements. Marvin