[Wocky] username vs. username@mit.edu

[Joanne Hallisey]

This is something that we should gauge user response to.  If it is  
not a big deal to them, maybe you can wait.

Joanne Hallisey
Sr. Project Manager
Information Services and Technology
W92-153
617-253-1894
hallisey at mit.edu



On Nov 17, 2005, at 1:30 PM, Greg Hudson wrote:

> As we all know, one of our big usability issues with Jabber is that
> users commonly enter just a username into the buddy list and expect it
> to work like username at mit.edu would.
>
> I have discouraging news on this front.  A Jabber JID looks like:
>
>       jid             = [ node "@" ] domain [ "/" resource ]
>
> That is, while "username at mit.edu" is the most common expected form of
> a JID, just plain old "mit.edu" is valid as well--but it is treated as
> a domain, not as a username.  It's apparently common to write Jabber
> messages to things like "mit.edu/announce/online" to get certain
> automated behavior from the Jabber server.
>
> I initially thought this was not a big deal, because the spec required
> domains to contain a "." (or at least a ":" for IPv6 literal
> addresses) and most username do not, but apparently that's a mistake,
> not an intended restriction, and it's common in practice for people to
> send messages to "myserver/announce/online" without a dot in the
> domain name.
>
> The upshot is that Gaim developers are unwilling to accept a patch
> translating username into username at defaultdomain because it would be
> munging valid JIDs.  The mail thread is at
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php? 
> thread_id=8988122&forum_id=9587
> although the archive appears to be a little bit behind.
>
> It's too bad that Jabber's no-username form of a jid isn't
> @domain[/resource]; then there would be no ambiguity.  But we can't go
> back in time and change that.
>
> I will still look into a server-side hack to make this behavior work.
> But we won't ever get a clean solution without an incompatible change
> to XMPP.
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