Re: Last Call: draft-saintandre-jabberid (The Jabber-ID Header Field) to Proposed Standard

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Dave Crocker wrote:
> 
> 
> SM wrote:
>> The Jabber Identifier is associated with the author of the message; see
>> [MESSAGE]. If the "From:" header field contains more than one mailbox,
>> the
>>  Jabber-ID header should not be added to the message.  There should be no
>> more than one instance of the Jabber-ID header.
> 
> Seems like good text to me, too.
> 
> The more general challenges to this specification really are classic and
> reasonable, but only if there is no real motivation for immediate use. 
> They call for a more general solution, which is always a desirable
> thing, but they do not seem to represent a real constituency for doing
> the work now or, more importantly, for using it.  (Or am I wrong?)

I have no objections to working on a more general approach. Probably
that would mean two different header fields: one to encapsulate an "im:"
URI and the other to encapsulate a "pres:" URI. I'd be happy to work on
those specs with anyone who's interested. But as far as I can see there
is plenty of room in header-space, so publishing this as Informational
and adding the Jabber-ID header field to the provisional registry seems
appropriate to me.

<snip/>

> Speaking of Jabber vs. XMPP, I do not understand characterizing this as
> XMPP-related work if the references and label are to Jabber.  If Jabber
> is the context, then this clearly is an Informational document, since it
> pertains to a base that is outside the IETF (or other?) formal standards
> work.  If it relates to XMPP, then shouldn't that be the reference and
> label?
> 
> (And, yes, I understand the cultural issue here, but alas, folks chose
> to name the IETF standard "XMPP" and I think we are stuck with that as
> the label, unless someone wants to try to alter the name of the base
> standard.)

For historical reasons, even RFC 3920 and RFC 3921 use the term "JID",
the XML 'jid' attribute, etc., where "JID" stands for "Jabber ID" and
not (say) "Just an Identifier".

And yes there are long-standing cultural and political issues regarding
"Jabber" vs. "XMPP" among the hundreds of developers whom I don't even
try to herd. I tend to phrase it this way:

Jabber is to XMPP as email is to SMTP+POP+IMAP.

Or:

Jabber is to XMPP as the Web is to HTTP+HTML.

In the end it doesn't really matter what the name of the header field
is, does it? I mean we could call it the "Crocker" field if we really
wanted to, as long as the spec describing it clearly defined its
meaning. I happened to call it the "Jabber-ID" field because the term
"Jabber" has much greater mindshare than the term "XMPP" and eventually
one would hope that a header field of this kind will be used by real
people, not IETF protocol geeks or XMPP developers. This point about
mindshare is true even within the IETF: at WG meetings, you will hear
the chair ask for "a Jabber scribe" but I have never heard one ask for
"an XMPP scribe" (or to be even more precise -- since XMPP-based
groupchat is defined in a spec published by the XMPP Standards
Foundation -- "a scribe for the text chat room that uses XMPP and
XMPP-based extensions" or somesuch). I don't see a particularly good
reason to fight over labelling, especially if this specification is
Informational and the resulting header field is added to the provisional
registry (an intent that is not clear in this version of the spec, but
that will be clear in the next version).

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/

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