Hi folks,
Thanks to Guus's persistence, I finally took time to close a few
issues I have with the current XEP-0431 (Full Text Search in MAM).
The main issue is that the current version of the spec provides no
guarantees about how the search string (generally input from a user)
will be interpreted. Usually in such cases, I would say this is
fine... an implementation that returns all messages containing "bar"
when you submit a search for "foo" is obviously broken and nobody
would want to use it, even if it's 100% permitted behaviour by the
XEP.
But full-text search is actually a complex topic, and there are
various backend implementations that servers are likely to lean on.
Each of them has a different search syntax, and there is no way (in an
open ecosystem) for a user to know which of these may be used.
My proposal does two things to fix this situation:
1) Add a "simple" search type, which is recommended to be
implemented as a baseline for interoperability. For simple searches,
the server promises that no search terms or symbols will be
interpreted as special syntax - what you search is what you get.
2) Extend the existing ("advanced") search field with a
recommendation that the server includes a <desc> element (already
defined in XEP-0004) to explain the supported syntax to the user, and
an (entirely optional) machine-readable hint that can be used to
indicate to a client that a commonly-used syntax is supported.
Finally, most full-text search engines are not language-agnostic. This
is because they perform operations such as stemming, and utilize a
"stop word" list while building the index to help improve the search
results. Many default to English, and while searches in other
languages generally work, they may be silently worse. I've added an
optional tag through which the server can indicate the natural
languages that the search is optimized for. I feel least strongly
about this addition, since this information is usually going to be
apparent to the user already based on the context.
Commit:
https://github.com/xsf/xeps/compare/master...mwild1:xep-0431-v0.3.0?expand=1
Rendered: https://matthewwild.co.uk/uploads/xeps/xep-0431.html
Feedback welcome, including from Dave (document's author) who I
haven't consulted about these changes. If there are no objections,
I'll raise a PR soon.
Regards,
Matthew
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