Account editor

[Sean Egan]

On 7/31/07, Etan Reisner <pidgin at unreliablesource.net> wrote:
> No, I'm saying the exact opposite, the person would *want* us to come up
> with 'foo at mail' as the node but we would be forced (by definition of the
> way JIDs are defined) to parse it as having a node of 'foo' and a server
> of 'mail at server.com' (which may or may not be valid in and of itself but
> that's a different story). (At least given my understanding of the long
> and complicated JID Escaping thread going on at the moment. An
> understanding that could very well be entirely wrong as the scope of that
> XEP is under somewhat heated debate.)

I'm not convinced that this is some unsolvable problem, but until we
put separate "node" "domain" and "resource" fields in the "New Instant
Message" and "Add Buddy" dialogs – where JIDs would be far more often
entered – the point is moot.

> I'm mostly still just not sure what confusion we
> think we are solving with this change. I am unsure why we think that most
> people are going to clearly understand that they need to put in a bare jid
> (user at server.com) in one box while we seem to think they have problems
> understanding what the relevant parts of the JID even are.

They have problems understanding what the relevant parts of the JID
are because they know themselves simply by the bare JID.

It's an oddity. People know their JID to be seanegan at pidgin.im or
so-and-so at gmail.com, we add JIDs like that to our buddy list, and see
them (even our own) in the conversation window. Bare JIDs are listed
on our wiki pages; the bare JID is definitely the canonical
representation of an XMPP user except when entering your login details
where you suddenly have three fields to enter it.

Miranda is the only other client on
http://www.google.com/talk/otherclients.html – which happens to be a
decent survey of XMPP clients' logins procedures – that requires you
to enter any more than "foo at domain.com."

But I'd say ease-of-use is a stronger argument than confusion. It's
easier to type "seanegan at pidgin.im/Work" than it is to type 'seanegan'
click on domain, type 'pidgin.im' click on resource, and type 'Work,'
even if you use the tab key.

-s.