Account editor

[Etan Reisner]

On Sat, Jul 28, 2007 at 12:58:27PM -0500, Mark Doliner wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Jul 2007 01:25:08 -0400, Etan Reisner wrote
> > On Fri, Jul 27, 2007 at 04:10:43PM -0700, Sean Egan wrote:
> > > XMPP uses a complicated username split that separates the JID into
> > > three boxes, which tends to confuse people. I propose a single box,
> > > named JID, that takes 'seanegan at gmail.com/Work' If the resource (the
> > > /Work) part is omitted, we append the default.
> >
> > I'm not a fan of doing this because (as a recent thread on the standards
> > XMPP mailing list has made clear) it gets us into the game of having
> > to deal intelligently with people pasting things like 'foo at mail@server.com'
> > into the screen name field. Which is perfectly clear and has only one
> > actual meaning as a JID but requires parsing to work out as opposed
> > to using separate entry boxes.
>
> What?  It's a freaking computer program.  Parsing the server name and resource
> from a string isn't that hard.

No, it isn't hard it just will tend to not be what people expect. The
correct way to interpret 'foo at mail@server.com' input as a JID is to parse
it into Screenname: 'foo' Domain: 'mail at server.com' which is almost
decidedly not what the user expected or wanted. But parsing it the other
way is broken because @ is not a valid character in the node portion of a
JID. Which means that in order for someone to correctly enter that JID
they would need to understand how to correctly escape @ in a node (which
is to use \40) and put it in as 'foo\40mail at server.com'.

I have no problem requiring them to do that input their jid like that in
the rare case of that being necessary but I see no reason to require it. I
think a part of the problem here is likely the use of 'Domain' as opposed
to the more generally used term 'Server' as well as the fact that it
doesn't get filled with a default at the start. (Ignoring the Resource
confusion as that is a separate issue.)

I'm not going to put my foot down and say we shouldn't do it I just don't
really see what we think we are going to gain by doing it. I think we need
to try to figure out what exactly is causing the confusion and problems
now and see what we can do to fix those issues and maybe Sean has done
that, but I don't have a good sense of it myself.

> > (Not to mention making it more
> > complicated to pre-fill with a given server name, for things like
> > the Google Talk 'protocol'.)
>
> You could pre-fill it with "example at gmail.com."  Or even better, don't
> pre-fill it with anything and then append gmail.com if the user didn't enter a
> server name.

Automatically appending things doesn't work out so well, I seem to recall
we used to try to do that for MSN addresses a while ago and had to stop
because it was more annoying than useful.

> On a related note, Sean, how does the Google Talk client know whether to use
> gmail.com or googlemail.com?  I can enter the user portion of my
> googlemail.com account into Google Talk and it is somehow able to log in.

That works in pidgin to, there's a Google Talk XMPP stream feature that
says something to the effect of "I trust you to tell me what my full JID
really is" or something like that I believe.

> -Mark

	-Etan