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Allow servers to advertise supported WHOX fields #98

Open emersion opened 2 years ago

emersion commented 2 years ago

Right now there is no mechanism for servers to advertise support for WHOX fields. This means clients assume all fields are supported, and forces servers to reply with dummy values for fields which don't make sense (e.g. IP or op level).

But more importantly, this makes it so WHOX is not extensible: it's not possible to add a new field, because clients have no way to know whether they could request it.

It would be nice to allow the WHOX ISUPPORT to carry a list of supported fields.

slingamn commented 2 years ago

I like the overall goal here but this seems like it's going to reproduce the problem with MODE letters: there's a limited supply of single letters that can be used to name fields, and the registration/standardization process for the semantics of those letters is not clear.

There was value in formally specifying WHOX, given that it was a de facto standard, but should we really be doubling down on it? Maybe a more ambitious specification effort is called for? (Possibly with some kind of pagination support.)

(What are some candidate extensions?)