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by rakoo 4304 days ago
I see your problems are that core XMPP provides very little and you need extensions to actually build something interesting. Which is very true, however we have come to a state where some of them are included by default in any good server or client implementation)

> Not particularly web-friendly – you can’t easily speak XMPP from a web browser.

Is Bosh (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0124.html) not good enough ?

> Single server per MUC is a single point of control and availability

Very true. There has been attempts to federate MUCS (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0289.html) but the problem here is about human roles and who can do what (notwithstanding end-to-end integrity)

> History synchronisation is very much a second class citizen feature

Not yet standard, but everyone is betting on Message Archive Management (http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0313.html).

I could cite counterpoints for every one of your points but that's not interesting. The real issues I see with XMPP are:

* No efficient support for binary -- The official way to do it is to setup another transport with Jingle. Which is sad because a transport was already setup, and now we need another one...

* Because of previous point, any potential cryptography will waste a lot of space

* No framing (a point you cited), which is absurd considering that XMPP is a routing protocol

* XML is a non-joy to work with (Note: JSON would not be a complete solution, see previous points)

Even though it has deficiencies, I'm still betting (and working) on it. What we really lack is software, and tools built on a protocol, not a new protocol.