alt Hacker NewsUnfortunately XMPP is an absolutely terrible protocol. IRC's not much good either, but at least it has the excuse of being ancient and limited in what it wanted to achieve.
I don't know how it just happens that sending text messages to people can manage to result in specs that are painful to implement.
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I once implemented the presence and basic messaging functionality of XMPP for a web site, using a braindead bridge (that I also wrote; so, the meaningful logic lived in the browser).
Considering I'd never hosted an XMPP daemon and didn't know anything about the protocol (I'd used XMPP clients a little bit, but had never looked at the protocol) and got a server (that part, I didn't write), an auth connector for our website's authentication system (so the daemon would authenticate against that instead), prod-ready and the features I wanted all working smoothly and reliably in maybe three weeks of very part-time work (this'd be, like, 3-4 part-time days with LLMs now, tops, from the same starting point)... seems decent to me? I mean I did direct work with the protocol, didn't just glue together libraries, and it was pretty damn good. Also (and I know browsers seem to be retreating on this front, which sucks) being XML made it very nice to work with in a Web context, since you can just ask the browser to turn ~any XML into a DOM for you, and get a bunch of functionality for free.
What's wrong with it?
> I don't know how it just happens that sending text messages to people can manage to result in specs that are painful to implement.
This is what boggles my mind. We're talking: Text. Over the Internet. It should not be a complex, difficult problem! We've been sending text over the Internet from the moment the Internet went online. So how is it that 10 companies have managed to find 30 different ways to do it, which are all incompatible with each other? You have to TRY to fail this badly.
Why is it terrible?
>Unfortunately XMPP is an absolutely terrible protocol
Can you provide more details here? I've never seen an issue with the protocol at all, more issues with feature difference between servers depending on what they have decided to implement or not.