>> It seems to me that the point of creating a standard is so that >> systems can interoperate. If we know in advance that the systems >> handling the majority of the world's mail are vanishingly unlikely >> to implement something, what's the point? > >Using that argumentation we can close down XMPP work too, since google >and facebook, the 99% of chat messages, are deviating from XMPP on >purpose. What's the point of writing more XMPP documents? It was definitely a victory for open standads when Google and Facebook adopted XMPP for their systems. The people I know at both companies are pretty reasonable, so if they're diverging from the specs it's unlikely to be just to be gratuitously incompatible. Given their size, I agree that there are likely more XMPP users at Google and Facebook than everywhere else combined which means that in the real world, they're the standard that everyone will implement and if we disagree, we're the outliers. If we can't come up with standards that they can use, or at least document what the largest systems do so everyone else can interoperate, we're not much of a standards organization. R's, John