Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

"Addressed" as in "most of the XEPs are marked as experimental and are subject to change".

That might look a bit weird on the outside, but this is how protocol design works in the XSF. First you make a proposal (which is marked as Experimental), then you implement it and wait for other people to implement it as well, and then you look how well it works and whether it has rough edges that need fixing. If it is considered good, it moves on to Draft and then to Final [0].

This process could be faster for sure, but that requires independent developers to work on implementations and to share their experience.

[0] https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0001.html#approval-std

Is there a set of mobile and desktop clients that support all these things you said were "addressed" properly? People always parade Conversations, but if I want phone-only I already have to many messengers.

Because if have to look through tables and bug trackers to figure out what client/server combination I can use (and have to pester my friends to use(!)) you can't count something as "addressed" IMHO. I still use only a very basic set of features with XMPP, because in my experience attempts to get anything advanced are way to time-intensive to be worth it for the few buddies still on XMPP, and I can't really push new people onto it that way.

> WARNING: This Standards-Track document is Experimental. Publication as an XMPP Extension Protocol does not imply approval of this proposal by the XMPP Standards Foundation. Implementation of the protocol described herein is encouraged in exploratory implementations, but production systems are advised to carefully consider whether it is appropriate to deploy implementations of this protocol before it advances to a status of Draft.

Let me stress this:

> production systems are advised to carefully consider whether it is appropriate to deploy implementations of this protocol before it advances to a status of Draft

That's from XEP-0363: HTTP File Upload.

When incompatible changes are applied, the namespace used for feature negotiation is usually version-bumped, so implementations can choose to support and negotiate different versions of a given extension whenever that seems sensible.

Not sure this works as well elsewhere (e.g. the Matrix spec just states that it's "still evolving: the APIs are not yet frozen and this document is in places a work in progress or stale").

XEP-0363: HTTP File Upload

> WARNING: This Standards-Track document is Experimental. Publication as an XMPP Extension Protocol does not imply approval of this proposal by the XMPP Standards Foundation. Implementation of the protocol described herein is encouraged in exploratory implementations, but production systems are advised to carefully consider whether it is appropriate to deploy implementations of this protocol before it advances to a status of Draft.

It means that there will be one client that supports this (Conversations for Android) and maybe one server supporting this (probably ejabberd). Good luck navigating the minefield :)

Meanwhile I can install Slack on multiple devices and have the same functionality everywhere :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com