Re: Should XEP features with apparent impact be hidden to older clients?

On Wed, 10 Dec 2025 at 17:47, Schimon Jehudah <[email protected]> wrote:

> So, how is it that older clients *do* display contents of elements with
> xmlns that is not supported?
>
> is there a directive in the RFC specifications of the XMPP standard
> which recommends to realize only elements of supported xmlns?
>

The spec relating to this is this one:
https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0428.html

The idea of this is that clients send wall-of-text rendered bodies, and
naive clients display those, but clients which understand particular
extensions then process the rewriting rules within fallback to render a
different (cleaner) message.

But this comes down to a complex product choice - if you're faced with a
reaction, for example, what should a client show? A single emoji as a
message? Unfortunately it's the choice of the sender, rather than the
receiver, what the fallback body ends up being - and worse, non-naive
clients then edit the fallback body according to whatever the
sender dictates.

This was not my idea for this spec at all, but it's where consensus got us.

Dave.

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