Resolve uncertainty about File Sharing Standards
Dear Council Members, For years now we have two competing standards https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0447.html and https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0385.html and it leads to confusion and additional work for new implementers and prevents in some cases implementations at all. According to the xmpp.org page both XEPs have each 6 implementations. I would suggest to issue a last call to gather feedback. After all feedback is addressed council should advances only one. Regards Philipp
Pretty sure many clients send (and handle) boring old OOB for file sharing, too. On Sat, 4 Apr 2026 at 22:16, Philipp Hörist <philipp@hoerist.com> wrote:
Dear Council Members,
For years now we have two competing standards https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0447.html and https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0385.html and it leads to confusion and additional work for new implementers and prevents in some cases implementations at all.
According to the xmpp.org page both XEPs have each 6 implementations.
I would suggest to issue a last call to gather feedback. After all feedback is addressed council should advances only one.
Regards Philipp _______________________________________________ Standards mailing list -- standards@xmpp.org To unsubscribe send an email to standards-leave@xmpp.org
Although I'm partial to SFS, it would definitely be nice to have one standard everyone agrees on here, regardless of which one it ends up being or how we get there. On 4 April 2026 9:15:21 pm UTC, "Philipp Hörist" <philipp@hoerist.com> wrote:
Dear Council Members,
For years now we have two competing standards https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0447.html and https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0385.html and it leads to confusion and additional work for new implementers and prevents in some cases implementations at all.
According to the xmpp.org page both XEPs have each 6 implementations.
I would suggest to issue a last call to gather feedback. After all feedback is addressed council should advances only one.
Regards Philipp
Hi, While I am all for gathering feedback, I'd like to remind that the purpose of a last call is to advance the status of the specification. Both XEPs can't be advanced without also advancing some other XEPs they depend on. Specifically about XEP-0385, I'd like to point out that for what I know, the specification diverts from what is implemented in the wild and from the examples in itself: The normative text does not describe the XEP-0372 <reference> container element around the XEP-0385 <media- sharing> and even the references inside the XEP-0385 <sources> element are not described in the normative part to use XEP-0372. While implementations (for what I know) do mandate the <reference> element around the <media-sharing> they often don't support the begin/end attribute shown in the example. Some implementations do allow the uri attribute of the XEP-0372 <reference> to be set and will interpret it as a download source for the file. Many (all?) implementations only support a single source uri and many (all?) don't support the XEP-0358 file retrieval defined in XEP-0385. Some implementation will even support no uri being present on either the outer <reference> or the <reference> inside <sources> for as long as an appropriate oob tag is present. Finally, it is unclear if sending multiple media files within a single message is intended to be supported by XEP-0385, but if it is (which I personally would have assumed, based on being able to have <reference> begin/end attributes for multiple parts of the message body), I doubt that implementations do have support for it. Marvin On Sat, 2026-04-04 at 23:15 +0200, Philipp Hörist wrote:
Dear Council Members,
For years now we have two competing standards https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0447.html and https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0385.html and it leads to confusion and additional work for new implementers and prevents in some cases implementations at all.
According to the xmpp.org page both XEPs have each 6 implementations.
I would suggest to issue a last call to gather feedback. After all feedback is addressed council should advances only one.
Regards Philipp _______________________________________________ Standards mailing list -- standards@xmpp.org To unsubscribe send an email to standards-leave@xmpp.org
Hi, So can i read from your reply that you as council member do not agree that it is ready for a Last Call in its current state? What about XEP-0447 and its dependencies? Regards Philipp On Sun, Apr 5, 2026, at 00:08, Marvin W. via Standards wrote:
Hi,
While I am all for gathering feedback, I'd like to remind that the purpose of a last call is to advance the status of the specification. Both XEPs can't be advanced without also advancing some other XEPs they depend on.
Specifically about XEP-0385, I'd like to point out that for what I know, the specification diverts from what is implemented in the wild and from the examples in itself: The normative text does not describe the XEP-0372 <reference> container element around the XEP-0385 <media-sharing> and even the references inside the XEP-0385 <sources> element are not described in the normative part to use XEP-0372.
While implementations (for what I know) do mandate the <reference> element around the <media-sharing> they often don't support the begin/end attribute shown in the example. Some implementations do allow the uri attribute of the XEP-0372 <reference> to be set and will interpret it as a download source for the file. Many (all?) implementations only support a single source uri and many (all?) don't support the XEP-0358 file retrieval defined in XEP-0385. Some implementation will even support no uri being present on either the outer <reference> or the <reference> inside <sources> for as long as an appropriate oob tag is present. Finally, it is unclear if sending multiple media files within a single message is intended to be supported by XEP-0385, but if it is (which I personally would have assumed, based on being able to have <reference> begin/end attributes for multiple parts of the message body), I doubt that implementations do have support for it.
Marvin
On Sat, 2026-04-04 at 23:15 +0200, Philipp Hörist wrote:
Dear Council Members,
For years now we have two competing standards https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0447.html and https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0385.html and it leads to confusion and additional work for new implementers and prevents in some cases implementations at all.
According to the xmpp.org page both XEPs have each 6 implementations.
I would suggest to issue a last call to gather feedback. After all feedback is addressed council should advances only one.
Regards Philipp _______________________________________________ Standards mailing list -- standards@xmpp.org To unsubscribe send an email to standards-leave@xmpp.org
_______________________________________________ Standards mailing list -- standards@xmpp.org To unsubscribe send an email to standards-leave@xmpp.org
participants (4)
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Dave Cridland -
Marvin W. -
Philipp Hörist -
snit