Re: Proposed XMPP Extension: Explicit Mentions

Maxime Buquet <[email protected]> Fri, 13 Mar 2026 11:51:04 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.network.jabber.standards-jig
Message-ID	<abPnRmDyiyiuoNJm@kea>
On 2026/03/11, Snit Guckfung via Standards wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:43:07 +0100
> Maxime Buquet <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Making sure we're on the same page: the original idea here would NOT
> have mandated the use of any character, nor any particular one. One
> could send "user", "@user", "user:", or anything else, and all I asked
> was that the extra formatting character be included in the range, IF
> you opt to send them at all. This recommendation would have applied
> equally to all languages and characters with NO exceptions. It would
> also not have recommended one way or the other whether to even send
> those characters to begin with.
> 
> A client might stylise all mentions as "@user". It should be able to
> receive "user", "@user", "user:", or anything else in the body, and
> know that it'll render as "@user", not "@@user" or "@user:". This was
> my sole goal.

What if a client doesn't use the "@" character but something else.
Should it also treat "@" as special on reception? Which characters
should also be treated specially for this case?

More importantly, I don't think "@" should appear anywhere in the body
element of the sent message, hence including it in begin/end attributes
not making sense to me. (As opposed to natural language "markers",
punctuation and the like, which may)

To me, an "@" (or equivalent) may only be used in clients for
autocompletion, and/or as a graphical marker to show it's a mention. Yes
that means the displayed and sent messages aren't the same, and that's
already the case anyway with other features.

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