On Montag, 16. Oktober 2017 18:38:46 CEST Jonas Wielicki wrote:
> The XMPP Extensions Editor has received a proposal for a new XEP.
> 
> Title: Body Markup Hints
> Abstract:
> This document specifies hints about the markup language used in
> elements.
> 
> URL: https://xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/bmh.html

So, I don’t like this. The reason is that it will require trickery to make it 
usefully interoperable. For example, there are different flavours of Markdown 
(let’s call them Vanilla, Chocolate and Strawberry). Now a message is sent 
which happens to be compatible Vanilla and Strawberry, but not Chocolate.

Here’s the first issue: does the client *know* that? Or will it only tag it as 
one of the flavours? If it tags only as Vanilla, a client which may support 
Strawberry would not correctly display the markup.

The second issue is if a client which supports Strawberry and Chocolate sees a 
message in Vanilla flavour. It could try to parse it as either Strawberry or 
Chocolate (which would probably work in *most* cases, but not in all), or not 
show proper markup.


This generalises to other markup languages and different versions of them and 
is not a problem specific to Markdown.


This could lead to islands of clients only supporting whatever markup language 
is hip in the language they’re implemented in (python clients for example 
supporting reStructuredText, many others one or another flavour of Markdown) 
etc., leading to a very inconsistent user experience, which I don’t like about 
this.


(Even if it isn’t meant as a replacement for XHTML-IM, I fear that it would be 
used as such.)


kind regards,
Jonas

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