> Isn't JID Escaping support and/or User Nickname support in both client > and transport a better solution for this?
I don't see the link with JID escaping. As for user nickname support: user nickname is for nickname updates, not nickname initialization. You could leave the name of your roster item uninitialized (then again, there's no way to know whether a name is initialized or not), and 'automatically' initialize it once you get nickname notification, but this is a very complex flow, and suffers from the general security problem of automatic nickname assignments. With roster item exchange, the user gets a new contact, suggested groups, suggested nickname, ... and can accept everything in one pass. Remko
