Re: SIMPLE chat: Internationalization and normalization of nicknames

On Mar 1, 2012, at 4:48 PM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:

> On 3/1/12 3:45 PM, Ben Campbell wrote:
>> 
>> On Mar 1, 2012, at 4:26 PM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>> 
>>> On 3/1/12 3:12 PM, Ben Campbell wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> 
>> 
>> [...]
>> 
>>>> (as individual)
>>>> 
>>>> I concur with this approach in general, although I think we will
>>>> find some differences between the Resource parts in 6122/6122bis
>>>> and the use of nicknames in simple-chat. In particular:
>>>> 
>>>> 1) A resource part identifies something. That makes uniqueness
>>>> and comparisons fairly important. OTOH, a nickname is really for
>>>> human display purposes. We still need to be able to compare them
>>>> for reservations to work. And the human readability part means we
>>>> should at least mention character confusion issues.
>>> 
>>> In the chatroom context, XMPP resourceparts are mostly used for
>>> display purposes but also for some authorization decisions (e.g.,
>>> we can kick people based on their nickname). As far as I understand
>>> it, the uses are really quite similar in XMPP chatrooms and SIMPLE
>>> chatrooms.
>>> 
>> 
>> My understanding of simple-chat is that the participant that you make
>> policy decisions about would be identified by a bona-fide URI. For
>> example, if we kick someone, we would supply the URI.  The nickname
>> is a data attribute associated with the URI, and really is a display
>> name for most practical purposes. Of course, you might select the
>> nickname in a GUI in order to get you client to do the right thing.
> 
> OK. It seems that you might also be making some authorization decisions
> based on the nickname, e.g., if you've reserved a nickname then I can't
> get that nickname (can I join the chatroom but just not with that
> nickname?).
> 

Yes, that is true. We do need an equality operator in some sense. (And yes, assuming no other policy issue was blocking you, you could still use a different nickname)