jdev - 2024-04-22

Sorry if that's the wrong chan for that, I was thinking about message replies, is there any provision for replying to only part of a message? If not, would it be advisable (although ugly) for clients to split multi lines messages so that distinct lines can be replied individually?

I think that train left the station. Yes it would be horrible I'd you send a message for each line, only for the chance that somebody wants to reply to a specific line

Simply use quoting as always

i dont think there is any app that allows you to select a specific thing to reply to

with replies that is, not quotes

Please register yourself to the Berlin XMPP sprint in July, or ask someone with wiki access to do so for you: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Sprints/2024-07_Berlin

> Yes it would be horrible I'd you send a message for each line, only for the chance that somebody wants to reply to a specific line Not necessarily, the displaying could be that of a single message, while the quoting UX lets you do it at paragraph-level

> Simply use quoting as always Wouldn't that break the relationship/"jump back" to the quoted message?

If not, I'm all for it

what is the differnce between quoting and replies?

in xmpp client level

rom1dep: it's not worth the effort for a jump to functionality

Cost/Benefit does not check out for me

lovetox: it just looks inconsistent, then (you end-up with both replies and quotes, which are basically the same thing conceptually from a user perspective, but have vastly different user experiences/expectations and underpinnings)

not that I want to die on that hill, I just think there's a case for that

Hm it only the same on the very surface. Reply is not a quote for me. It just references a message. So it adds a context

While a quote focuses on a specific part of a message

i mean there is no reason replies cant be quotes no?

> i mean there is no reason replies cant be quotes no? I thought that was the whole point :)

MSavoritias (fae,ve): yes there is. It is not and it's published as standard.

Of course you can do a new thing with a different name ✏

or i can update the replies xep :)

MSavoritias (fae,ve): you can try. I doubt the author will follow your argument.

didnt know the author had all the power :/ well that sucks

i hope i dont need to change many xeps then

About replies, if we're being practical, from what I see from non-techies in walled garden, they use rich replies *a lot*, notably because it has the nice property of "pinging" the person being replied to. And I've never seen any body be interested in partial quotes. Look at emails, besides a few weirdos (like me and I guess a lot of in people in the MUC), who quotes part of the original email and reply below?

Replies that point to the original message rather than quoting it are definitely widely used, not least because that's what Slack, Discord, Messages, etc. do. ✏

(Well, Slack's slightly odd about how it does it, to be fair)

And if we don't want to be practical and yakshave, we should think more about how replies and threads interact. In some popular walled gardens, they're unified as a single concept for instance, ie, replying to a message starts a new thread from this message.

i mean most of the time i quote because the client i am using shows the *whole* message and i dont want it to because it takes space

> And if we don't want to be practical and yakshave, we should think more about how replies and threads interact. In some popular walled gardens, they're unified as a single concept for instance, ie, replying to a message starts a new thread from this message. +1

( i dont have reactions)

> yup, the current status-quo (well, besides XMPP, which still mostly lacks replies) is a 95% solution, but even non-techies sometimes write long messages with multiple ideas/concepts defeating "reply to whole message" > If we could have replies with start_char_ix/end_char_ix it could be neat (but yet again the UX wouldn't be trivial to come up with) yup, the current status-quo (well, besides XMPP, which still mostly lacks replies) is a 95% solution, but even non-techies sometimes write long messages with multiple ideas/concepts defeating "reply to whole message" If we could have replies with start_char_ix/end_char_ix it could be neat (but yet again the UX wouldn't be trivial to come up with) ↺

rom1dep: you can reply and quote at the same time

Of course you probably say then I want to reply to multiple people in the same message

> Of course you probably say then I want to reply to multiple people in the same message Isn't that permitted with the current reply spec? I see that used very often on Teams

No it's not permitted

The problem is the reply spec has no notion of where a replY should be included inside the text

You could add multiple replies, but the receiving client cannot assign specific text to each reply

And even if you add a possibility to specify start end etc

This breaks the fallback indication xep

So all in all the reply XEP is a very simple WhatsApp reply kind of spec

And that works for most people I would say

If we want something more advanced, a new spec should be made in my opinion

But this is beside the discussion because Ms teams also does not allow you to reply to parts of text

And I'm not sure we need to solve that. This is IM. People don't write 100 word messages

heh you are not in the rooms i am in :P

Clients don't have to display the whole message which has been replied to. That's where you click the referred message to scroll to that position.

And yes, sure you can reply to a message (which references it), then quote parts of it manually via ">" message styling, plus pinging people by mentioning them in your reply

> Sorry if that's the wrong chan for that, > I was thinking about message replies, is there any provision for replying to only part of a message? If not, would it be advisable (although ugly) for clients to split multi lines messages so that distinct lines can be replied individually? Reply with a non-fallback quote ↺

i mean reading the xep its very bare bones and doesnt mention anything about parts of a message so wouldnt it be possible?

to add it i mean

it doesnt even mention what to do with the body at all

the 0461 that is

also second nicoco that not taking threads into account is non-starter and severily limits the feature of this xep

Cheogram Android defaults to reply starts a thread but allows the user to change that before sending

sure. thats great. it would be nice to mention something in the xep about it :)

> also second nicoco that not taking threads into account is non-starter and severily limits the feature of this xep wow I never said it's a non-starter ;) I don't even have a clear idea of what should be mentioned regarding threads. xep0461 does not mention threads at all, but does not forbid using both a reply and a thread "orthogonally". what cheogram does sounds reasonable to me. with the slight issue that you start a thread from a message that does not have a thread, so you end up in this weird state where the first message of a thread is a reply to a message that is outside the thread. maybe that's not a problem in practice, I don't really know tbh.

i would love to go the zulip route there

everything is a thread by default

its just most messages are the "main thread" and there is no ui for it

that way there is always a thread to refer to

at least thats the way i plan to implement it

> > also second nicoco that not taking threads into account is non-starter and severily limits the feature of this xep > wow I never said it's a non-starter ;) I don't even have a clear idea of what should be mentioned regarding threads. xep0461 does not mention threads at all, but does not forbid using both a reply and a thread "orthogonally". what cheogram does sounds reasonable to me. with the slight issue that you start a thread from a message that does not have a thread, so you end up in this weird state where the first message of a thread is a reply to a message that is outside the thread. maybe that's not a problem in practice, I don't really know tbh. yes, for clients which prefer a UI showing a thread as "forked off" from a message this is what you want. In Cheogram Android we simply include such message in the single-thread view

> zulip strikes me as "more noise, for the sake of it", I don't get it nor see the benefits (the UX is pretty much that of creating many rooms, that's not pretty, that's not searchable, that's "in your face", etc) zulip strikes me as "more noise, for the sake of it", I don't get it nor see the benefits (the UX is pretty much that of creating many rooms, that's not pretty, that's not searchable, that's "in your face", etc) ↺

i didnt say to copy the UX :)

Also that's UX, not protocol

you dont have to expose the thread if you dont want to. so its client logic really not UX

Exactly. Nobody forbids replies + threads

sorry for jumping the guns there, there was no upper bound to what "the zulipe route" might look like :) that said, I'd be cautious with "everything is a thread by default", people not minding threads (whom I expect to be the majority) might too easily break threads accidentally at the expense of those who care

rom1dep: from which client are you writing these messages

I see weird behaviour in C

Seems like you quoting yourself

lovetox: yours, WS's message replies branch

That's like work I'm progress, just so you know it looks weird in other clients

oh, wow, I now see how bad it looks from dino 🙂

may I see a screenshot? :)

it sends itself as fallback instead the replied message

that's certainly confusing :)

https://upload.tamytro.org/upload/a3849b367f4dd4cedd5ad6f64afa7645b7d4f834/ZUf47z19WHFNu6hVyo9N97JzrA9A4xSjcQgGE0tX/b79b5982-a78b-4e4d-9405-e2f25924a1c3.png

https://upload.tamytro.org/upload/a3849b367f4dd4cedd5ad6f64afa7645b7d4f834/ordxU6RYJq2V90RZrzzhWp5XocRTN0oRwr0r2W9b/2c6bf72a-1d6d-4ba8-a8fc-d455a1f736a6.png

huh, how come my image paste (from both dino & gajim) appear as urls in the other client instead of as "embeddings"?

room policy

thanks, rom1dep :)

how come it doesn't appear that way to you?!

> thanks, rom1dep :) breaking gajim in novel ways? Sign me in! ↺