Martin. Good afternoon. On Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:53:29 +0000 Martin <debacle@debian.org> wrote:
Hi Schimon, hi list,
On 2026-03-15 03:27, Schimon Jehudah via Standards wrote:
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.
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.
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