🤔 Prosoal: Disallowed the <a href="/timeline/profile?url=form of mentions. **Strictly** require that all mentions include a nickname/name; i.e:@<name url">@url></a><a href="form of mentions. **Strictly** require that all mentions include a nickname/name; i.e:@<name url" class="webmention">`.

@head_honcho_supremus sounds good but, when using Yarn---at least---users shouldn't need to worry about this minutiae. They simply hit "Reply", or "Fork".

Note, I manually added a nick to this reply.

@bender I agree. I'm just saying spec-wise, this makes implementations have to worry about less edge cases like this 🤣

Otherwise if we insist on allowing things like @<url> then I have to do quick a bit of dancing to figure out how to render such mentions sanely 😅😅

What say you @movq @lyse @eapl.mx / @darch @andros (new client author)? 🤔 Shall I PR this up?

For the record; we consider the new authority on the Twtxt spec(s) going forward (has been for some years actually) to be implementers / primary maintainers of widely used clients. To date that is:

• yarnd @prologic (me and others)
• jenny @movq
• tt @lyse
• Timeline @darch / @eapl.me and others
• twtxt-el? -- @andros

Full list of supported and widely used clients can be found at https://twtxt.dev/clients.html -- which I note a few above are actually missing from this page haha 🤣

@prologic Fine by me. I don’t see/remember a valid reason for just doing @. Was there ever a reason to do that? 🤔

@prologic @movq Well, the original Twtxt Specification explicitly allows for the short form with just a URL and no nick: https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html#format-specification

Mentions are embedded within the text in either <a href="/timeline/profile?url=source.url">@source.nick</a><a href="source.url" class="webmention"></a> or @<source.url> format […]

I'd just continue supporting it, even though I don't see it all that often in the wild. I guess more common is the case where just a nick is given, which is illegal. But yarnd users seem to produce it every now and then.

What's the motivation for deprecation?

tt currently supports all three forms: <a href="/timeline/profile?url=url">@nick</a><a href="url" class="webmention"></a>, <a href="/timeline/profile?url=and even the illegal@<nick">@url></a><a href="and even the illegal@<nick" class="webmention">`. The difference between the last two is whether the token in angle brackets looks like a URL or not. Whenever a nick is available, the nick is rendered. In case there is just a URL, it tries to resolve the nick from the subscriptions. If that also does not work, it displays the URL.

@lyse

What’s the motivation for deprecation?

Namely that without the mention having a label (as such) it becomes very hard to render it in any sane/nice way. I think we should just stick to <a href="/timeline/profile?url=url">@label</a><a href="url" class="webmention"></a> personally. It makes implementations have to worry about far less edge cases.

@movq

Was there ever a reason to do that? 🤔

I'm not sure to be honest. I have no idea why you'd ever want to do a "nameless" @-mention.

As an aside, if we could all agree, I'd personally just say we scrap this whole fragile broken shit and bring out WebMentions and be done with it. And then mentions are always @nick@domain and looked up, cached and can never be screwed up haha 🤣

@prologic If you've got the feed URL in yarnd's cache, you can easily look up a missing nick. If you can't find it, just show the URL (or maybe just the domain name to be halfway consistent with this @nick@domain thing that yarnd invented) and be done. It's really that simple.

When yarnds peer with each other, the odds of actually having come across that feed URL in the past are higher than with traditional clients that only have their local set of subscribed feeds. One additional improvment would be to also look at all the mentions and see if somebody used a nick for that URL and go with that.

Yeah, yarnd currently renders some really weird shit when the mention contains just a URL, but I'd call that a bug for sure.

Personally, I do not like the @nick@domain syntax at all. It looks silly to my eyes. What might have also contributed is the fact of this mentions syntax gotten screwed up so many times by yarnd in the past. But that's a totally different topic.

@lyse Hmm you ate right 😆 Also did you volunteer to fix this 🤔🤣

word of the thay, prosoal Is it a typo of Proposal right? =P (Genuinely asking)

@eapl.me yeah, it is a typo, meant to be proposal. OP is the "Lord of the Typos". :-P

@bender Hahahahah 🤣🤣

@prologic I say we should find a way to support mentions with only url, no nick, as per the original spec.

• For <a href="/timeline/profile?url=url">@nick</a><a href="url" class="webmention"></a> we already got support
• For <a href="/timeline/profile?url=the posting client should expand it to@<nick url">@nick></a><a href="the posting client should expand it to@<nick url" class="webmention">, if not then the reading client should just render it as@nick` with no link.
• For <a href="/timeline/profile?url=the sending client should try to expand it to@<nick url">@url></a><a href="the sending client should try to expand it to@<nick url" class="webmention">`, if not then the reading client should try to find or construct a nick base on:
  1. Look in twtxt.txt for a nick =
  2. Use (sub)domain from URL
  3. Use folder or file name from URL

Sounds about as complex as adding @nick@domain support by doing a webfinger lookup to get the URL.