Escape characters in XEP-0393: Message Styling - Standards

22 Jan 2024

Hello,

first of all, this is my first attempted contribution to an Internet 
standard, so I do apologize if the form is a bit off.

That said, I was implementing a parser for "XEP-0393: Message Styling", 
and I ran into the issue that not much is defined in the way of escape 
characters.

In Gajim, for instance, the sequence

*hello*

becomes bold, the sequence

\*hello*

does not, but the sequence

\\*hello*

also does not.

In many applications, preceding a \ with another \ escapes the latter \, 
making it so that the escape character itself is escaped, and therefore 
the * that creates the emphasis span would not be.

However, the standard does not mention any rule regarding this (and 
Gajim does not do what I expect), so it is perhaps a good idea to add a 
note about this before making it final.

Kind regards,

Werner