[dwaite]

There were several members of the core team, pre-XMPP effort in IETF, who wanted to change it to have framing. If not a length-prefixed model, a nil-separated one.

There were ideas to separate out the addressing/routing from the actual messaging, so that servers did not need to process XML and so that messages did not necessarily need to be XML.

There were even some very preliminary ideas on using the servers to potentially negotiate peer connections for arbitrary traffic.

Back in the early 2000s there were a _lot_ of self-hosted Jabber servers though, and there was push-back from early commercial interests on any protocol-breaking changes resetting adoption to zero. This resulted in Jabber 1.0 pretty much becoming the basis of the XMPP RFC, with XMPP adding new authentication techniques and internationalized JIDs.

Later on, there were efforts to establish alternative transports to accomplish some of these alternative transports and forms - HTTP endpoints to poll for messages, JSON mappings of the core messages, etc.

I would argue against PSYC's claims (or would have, back in the day) that the usage of XML in XMPP is not proper, however. Its proper, it just wasn't the best idea.