Hi, this question comes from a recent discussion we had internally. We try to identify a best practice/convention when designing several somewhat-related extensions, specifically the naming of top-level elements in IQs.
It is noticeable that older, core-related XEPs (roster, disco etc.) use the convention of elementName "query" and namespace according to extension protocol. There was also the query action XEP-0099 which described a CRUD-pattern on IQ-query, but got deferred. It feels a bit odd to have a IQ set named "query", but apart from that, it helps to expect what you get in implementing. I have seen some implementations that offer comfort accessors to this pattern (think it was strophe). Newer XEPs seem to use one top-element name according to protocol (pubsub, si, jingle) and have sub-elements in own namespaces that deal with specific aspects. Also you see that some protocol extensions use several top-elements with the same namespace rather than a singular one, diverging the aspect on the element name. One could also design protocol extensions that use different elements and namespaces individually for its use case. All is valid XML and XMPP and seemingly used. The Guidelines in XEP-0134 and XEP-143 do not cover this. The thought is: Would it make sense to give some guideline/convention on how to design the schema, e.g. to name the payload child of an IQ, when to use a different namespace etc.? It could potentially make things more uniform, thus additionally allowing helper functions in implementations and increase reuse? Of course you could still vary from that convention, if you have some reason to do so. Please share your thoughts on this. Best Regards, Johannes
