Re: Reinstating XHTML-IM (XEP-0071)

Am I the only one seeing the irony that the two XEPs of which one you
phrase as "new", have been accepted in the very same Council meeting in
2017?

Also XEP-0394 is not aiming for "rich text" in the same way that XHTML-
IM provides it, especially it doesn't provide means for text coloring
or font family - it's meant for semantic markup.

Now specifically about XHTML, it's important to note that XHTML 1.0/1.1
were retired at its standardization body (W3C) in 2018. [1] The XML-
serialization of HTML5 is not recommended (see big warning on [2]). New
rendering engines like Servo do not support XHTML. In other words,
XHTML is basically dead.

XEP-0071 XHTML-IM is only a select subset of XHTML with unclear focus -
what the people at the time deemed sensible for the IM usecase. This
likely has changed since and remaining XMPP clients implementing it
often divert from the specification in some aspects (by supporting more
or less elements/attributes/properties than recommended).

Instead of reviving XHTML / XHTML-IM / XEP-0071 I would suggest those
that want to use HTML or XHTML, especially for non-IM usecases, to use
XEP-0481 to transfer HTML5.

For IM usecases, it's probably a good idea to write up which features
are desired from XHTML-IM that XEP-0394 does not provide, so we can
work on semantifying those for inclusion in XEP-0394.

Marvin


[1] https://www.w3.org/standards/history/xhtml11/
[2] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/xhtml.html#the-xhtml-syntax

On Sun, 2026-03-15 at 01:43 +0000, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
> > I am not an XSF member, yet I am interested to reinstate XHTML-IM.
> 
> I am very much in favour of this. While deprecation in favour of 
> https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0393.html may have seemed simpler at
> the 
> time, new work like
> https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0394.html demonstrates 
> that this is not enough and there is an appetite for full rich text.
> The 
> standardized rich tezt format is HTML which has the benefit (for us)
> of 
> having an obvious XML syntax and a pre existing XEP.
> 
> Besides this we also have new and acitve uses of XHTML-IM in the
> community 
> (not just by me) and leaving the XEP deprecated is confusing in this 
> context.
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