15 Mar
2026
15 Mar
'26
10:06 a.m.
Martin. Good afternoon.
On Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:53:29 +0000
Martin <debacle(a)debian.org> wrote:
Hi Schimon, hi list,
On 2026-03-15 03:27, Schimon Jehudah via Standards wrote:
I suppose that, the HTML support of XHTML-IM is designedly limited.
I do not think that it should be an issue, and I think that it is fine.
Those who are interested to have a complete XHTML experience, could
utilize Atomsub (XEP-0277 or XEP-0472), and developers can add
publishing capabilities to XMPP clients; and I certainly encourage
developers to do so, and add publishing capabilities to XMPP clients.
I am not an XSF member, yet I am interested to
reinstate XHTML-IM.
I have useful ideas that would be possible with XHTML-IM.
I used to be in favour of XHTML-IM, too, but now I'm not convinced
anymore myself. Let's talk about use cases first. I see:
1. Blogging with rich structure, like sections/subsections and tables.
If I'm not mistaken, XHTML-IM only has poor support for the former
(H1..H6 instead of "real" sections like e.g. DocBook/XML) and no
support for the latter.
2. Chatting or blogging with enriched syntax, like bold/italic, or
clickable links.
For the former, XHTML-IM as it is now, is not sufficient, IMHO. Both
XEP-0277: Microblogging over XMPP and XEP-0472: Pubsub Social Feed
refer to Atom and XHTML, but unfortunately recommend the XHTML-IM
subset.
For the latter, we have XEP-0393: Message Styling and
XEP-0394:
Message Markup. Which are missing clickable links, but that could be
added or we rely on XEP-0511: Link Metadata?
Link Metadata is a recent addition, which I think is good, and is
specifically associated with URI links.
Yet, XHTML-IM is designed to craft custom messages, and unlike
Markdown, XHTML is well defined; and, if XHTML are impressively
crafted, they could even prompt people to think of newer ideas to XMPP.
Of course, XHTML-IM COULD be abused by overwhelming people with a vast
amount of graphics formattings and other custom elements, which might
annoy people.
Cheers
Schimon