Re: Proposed XMPP Extension: Explicit Mentions

Maxime Buquet <[email protected]> Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:43:07 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.network.jabber.standards-jig
Message-ID	<abG04-GzOvsh5XXI@kea>
On 2026/03/11, Philipp Hörist wrote:
> 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".

Clients will provide graphical (plaintext or not) representation of
mentions and that's alright. I'm arguing against that representation
becoming part of the wire protocol. Nothing fancy.

> 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?

If a client were to use "@" to autocomplete nicknames, just like
gajim does, the client could also not include it in the wire protocol.
Just like gajim does.


As for anything that qualifies as a natural language (punctuation?) like
you showed, well I surely hope that also doesn't get specified as the
wire format.

It would be weird if it was mandated to include a comma (",") when
communicating in languages that don't use them, or use something else
(Japanese for example, and full-width chars). It's a good thing that
gajim made this configurable.

We can take natural languages into account to help shape the document
but we probably don't want to reference every single use-case/language
in it. We also don't want to ignore anything non-ascii/non-western like
it's been done in other XEPs, by mandating a specific character.

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