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MSC 2010: Proposal to add client-side spoilers

Sometimes, while you want to put text into a spoiler to not have people accidentally read things that they don't want to see.

For example, when discussing a new movie or a TV series, not everyone might have watched it yet. In such cases it would make sense to add a spoiler so that only those who have seen the movie or don't mind spoilers read the content. Another example would be e.g. in mental health communities where certain people have certain triggers. People could put talking about abuse or the like into a spoiler, to not accidentally trigger anyone just reading along the conversation. Furthermore this is helpful for bridging to other networks that already have a spoiler feature.

To render the spoiler the content is hidden and then revealed once interacted somehow (e.g. a click / hover).

Proposal

This proposal is about adding a new attribute to the formatted_body of messages with type m.room.message and message types which support the org.matrix.custom.html format.

It adds a new attribute, data-mx-spoiler, to the <span> tag. If the attribute is present the contents of the span tag should be rendered as a spoiler. Optionally, you can specify a reason for the spoiler by setting the attribute string. It could be rendered, for example, similar to this:

The plaintext fallback supported by the body is optional. A recommendation for clients is included below.

To preserve the semantics of a spoiler in the plaintext fallback it is recommended to upload the contents of the spoiler as a text file and then link this: [Spoiler](mxc://someserver/somefile) and [Spoiler for reason](mxc://someserver/somefile) respectively.

Example

Without reason:

{
    "msgtype": "m.text",
    "format": "org.matrix.custom.html",
    "body": "Hello there, the movie was [spoiler](mxc://someserver/somefile)",
    "formatted_body": "Hello there, the movie was <span data-mx-spoiler>awesome</span>"
}

With reason:

{
    "msgtype": "m.text",
    "format": "org.matrix.custom.html",
    "body": "Hey [Spoiler for movie](mxc://someserver/somefile)",
    "formatted_body": "Hey <span data-mx-spoiler="movie">the movie was awesome</span>"
}

Tradeoffs

Instead of making this an attribute, an entirely new tag could be introduced (e.g. <mx-spoiler>), however that wouldn't be HTML-compliant.

Instead of limiting the proposed data-mx-spoiler attribute only to the <span>-tag it could be added to all tags, however it might make implementations for clients more complicated.

Alternatively the details tag could be used. This, however, is a block element, and the spoilers are span elements. Furthermore semantically there is a slight difference: with the details tag you hide something for a person as it uses up a lot of screen space, while with a spoiler you hide something as a person might not want to see it.

Potential issues

Depending on context it might make sense to put other events, such as m.image, into spoilers, too. This MSC doesn't address that at all. Using <span data-mx-spoiler><img src="mxc://server/media"></span> seems rather sub-optimal for that.

This MSC doesn't take HTML block elements into account.

Clients would have to come up with a way to input spoilers. This could be done, for example, by adding a custom markdown tag (like discord does), so that you do Text ||spoiler||, however that doesn't take a spoiler reason into account.

Security considerations

The spoiler reason needs to be properly escaped when rendered.

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