10 Mar
2026
10 Mar
'26
10:26 p.m.
On Wed, 11 Mar 2026 02:43:47 +0100
Maxime Buquet <pep(a)bouah.net> 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).
Fair, fair. I figured it'd be more flexible to allow whatever extra
characters, so long as they're within the mention's specified range.
The main thing that I really want to avoid is a message sending "@user"
but only specifying "user" as the mention, which could cause a user
interface to display something akin to "@(@user)", where the "(@...)"
bit is just UI stylisation.
It doesn't technically matter whether the solution to that problem is
including the '@' in the mention or stripping it from the message
entirely, as long as its done consistently, so if the former method is
likely to cause other problems instead, I'm more than happy to do the
latter. :D