On 2026/03/11, Snit Guckfung via Standards wrote:
On Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:43:07 +0100 Maxime Buquet <pep@bouah.net> wrote:
If a client were to use "@" to autocomplete nicknames, just like gajim does, the client could also not include it in the wire protocol. Just like gajim does.
As for anything that qualifies as a natural language (punctuation?) like you showed, well I surely hope that also doesn't get specified as the wire format.
It would be weird if it was mandated to include a comma (",") when communicating in languages that don't use them, or use something else (Japanese for example, and full-width chars). It's a good thing that gajim made this configurable.
We can take natural languages into account to help shape the document but we probably don't want to reference every single use-case/language in it. We also don't want to ignore anything non-ascii/non-western like it's been done in other XEPs, by mandating a specific character.
Making sure we're on the same page: the original idea here would NOT have mandated the use of any character, nor any particular one. One could send "user", "@user", "user:", or anything else, and all I asked was that the extra formatting character be included in the range, IF you opt to send them at all. This recommendation would have applied equally to all languages and characters with NO exceptions. It would also not have recommended one way or the other whether to even send those characters to begin with.
A client might stylise all mentions as "@user". It should be able to receive "user", "@user", "user:", or anything else in the body, and know that it'll render as "@user", not "@@user" or "@user:". This was my sole goal.
What if a client doesn't use the "@" character but something else. Should it also treat "@" as special on reception? Which characters should also be treated specially for this case? More importantly, I don't think "@" should appear anywhere in the body element of the sent message, hence including it in begin/end attributes not making sense to me. (As opposed to natural language "markers", punctuation and the like, which may) To me, an "@" (or equivalent) may only be used in clients for autocompletion, and/or as a graphical marker to show it's a mention. Yes that means the displayed and sent messages aren't the same, and that's already the case anyway with other features.