Re: Proposed XMPP Extension: Explicit Mentions

Hi,

On 2026/03/11, snit via Standards wrote:

> This was something I'd meant to include in the original proposal, and have added to my current working draft. Special characters like '@' MAY be sent in the original message, perhaps to show unsupporting clients that this was a mention. But implementations SHOULD include such characters within the range covered by the mention, so that both "user" and "@user" mentions can be formatted the same way. I haven't special-cased any characters in particular, as maybe rooms will use '#', or a different client might format it as "user," to look similar to existing clients. I hope that makes sense.

I think the MAY is unnecessary here, i dont think the spec should make any recommendation how the plaintext of a mention should look like. The sentence is just an example of something that could happen on the wire and how to handle it.

On Wed, Mar 11, 2026, at 02:43, Maxime Buquet wrote:

> Please don't. Really don't clutter XMPP with yet another special-cased
> character. We have XML for that already.
>
> The "@", or any other character for that matter, can be used
> client-side and stripped when being sent. It's easy enough to come with
> UX to handle this.
>
> Non-supporting clients won't support "@" any more than they support this
> specification. It actually hurts these clients more as they may not
> match on the special char and thus miss the mention entirely (for
> example matching on the nick as a lone word, not part of another word or
> the like).

Im not sure i understand your goal. A client needs to provide a plaintext representation of a mention. I bet many clients do different things. Gajim includes "nickname, ", but its configurable by the user, it could also be "nickname:" and another client could do "@nickname".

I agree that the XEP does not need to make a recommendation about how plaintext looks, thats what the range is for. But i dont understand your statement that a client can strip an @ for its plaintext representation. Can Gajim also strip ", " ? Or another client ":" after the nickname? And why should it? Is there a correct representation for a plaintext mention? Why is @ more wrong than a  colon? Why would you care if you implement mention?

Regards
Philipp
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