With Explicit Mention, you have to be in the room to see the notification (as it's sent to the room itself), right?
My point is if you are in a huge room with lot of traffic, but not willing to see every single message: you are interested in going there from time to time, and being notified if somebody mentions you. In this case, you need to have the mention directly addressed to you, not to the room. Then you can join and retrieve messages of interest with MAM.
Another use case is mentioning somebody who is not an occupant of a room. But we may or may not want to handle this.
Ah, I see now. Yes, this would be useful functionality to have. I'm generally either always in a room or never in it, so I hadn't considered the case where someone only pops into rooms selectively. Could this be achieved with the MUC service sending something like XEP-224 in a message to you, or does that also only work if you're currently in the room? Otherwise, what exactly would this look like?
- XEP-0372 can also be used with Pubsub, which is, with my client developer hat, a very important feature to me.
As I said before, I basically have no clue how PubSub works at the moment, so I didn't even consider it initially. I'm not sure I understand the use-case, but I would be more than happy for it to be added, preferably by someone who actually knows what they need from such a feature. Otherwise, I can look into it later down the line.
For now, the important part is to have a way to notify somebody that they are mentioned in a blog, forum, event or whatever. This is possible with XEP-0372, the pubsub item URI is used. Referencing with begin/end the content is not possible at the moment though (as we would need a way to specify which element is used).
What exactly would the logistics of this be? Are the references / mentions attached to the blog post itself? How would the mentioned user get notified? Is it just on the things they're subscribed to?
IIRC Markup has been done after XHTML-IM has been deprecated (or around this time at least). It shouldn't be taken into account anymore (except if it comes back to life as requested by some people, but that's another story).
XHTML-IM is deprecated, but it seems people still intend to continue using it for various purposes, so it seems off to disregard it entirely. Regardless, I was using XHTML-IM as a stand-in for any markup format that isn't XEP-0394, be it XHTML-IM, XEP-0393, or some future XEP or proprietary format. I do the same in the following section, as well.
I'm not sure to understand your point here. Markup would need an (probably short) extension to explain that something is a mention.
My point is that I don't get why we'd make a markup format which is compatible with, and honestly just reinvents, XEP-0394, rather than just using XEP-0394 itself. The only explanation I could come up with is that some people don't want to implement XEP-0394, instead prefering some other markup format, such as XHTML-IM. However, the way mentions are currently marked up is an exact replica of XEP-0394, so I can't see an XHTML-IM user's objections to XEP-0394 not also applying to mentions. Markup is meant to be purely aesthetic, which is why all of the actual functionality would be going in a separate proposal, no? If so, then there's no real loss in not supporting the markup format, and if that's the case, then why shouldn't we just use XEP-0394? Since there's no real loss in not supporting XEP-0394 mention markup, there'd be no loss if an XHTML-IM enthusiast decided they wanted to specify a format which relies on XHTML-IM, instead. Both formats could coexist, because, again, all actual functionality is in a completely separate document that'd be supported regardless. One of the first responses to the proposal on this list has an example of what XHTML-IM markup for mentions could look like, and Marvin's recent response shows possible XEP-0394 markup. I can't seem to word this in a way I find satisfactory, so hopefully this explanation makes sense :)