Miscellaneous

Yesterday the IETF announced that draft-saintandre-xmpp-urn has been approved by the IESG for publication as an informational RFC. What this means for us is that the XSF (specifically the XMPP Registrar) will control its own “tree” of Uniform Resource Names to issue for use in XMPP Extension Protocols, as specified in Section 4 of XEP-0053. This is good because URNs are more stable than the URIs (such as “http://jabber.org/protocol/muc") that we’ve been using for XML namespaces in our protocols.[Read More]

Because the XSF is a standards development organization, we strive to honor standards developed by other organizations. To that end, we recently updated the web pages at www.xmpp.org (including our specification series) to comply with XHTML 1.0.

If you find a page with an “xhtml 1.0 compliant” link at the bottom but the page does not validate, please report the error to webmaster at xmpp.org.

In preparing an application for the XSF to officially achieve tax-exempt status with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, we discovered today that the original certificate of incorporation defined the organization as a “business league” under Section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code, rather than as an “educational, charitable and scientific organization” under Section 501(c)(3). The reasons for the original choice of purpose are lost in the mists of time, but in any case are not consistent with the focus of the organization over the last five years on standards development.[Read More]

We sometimes receive questions about whether there are restrictions on who may submit and comment on proposals to extend XMPP, join the various XMPP-related discussion venues, or participate in events such as our upcoming DevCon. The short answer is: No. The long answer is that we strive to be a completely open and transparent community. Unlike some standards development organizations that call themselves open but are in fact industry consortia with closed processes and high barriers to entry, the XMPP Standards Foundation is fully committed to openness.[Read More]

Two months ago we launched the XMPP Intermediate Certification Authority at xmpp.net. It was a bit of an unusual step for a standards development organization to take – after all, you don’t see the IETF, W3C, and IMC offering free digital certificates to hostmasters, webmasters, and postmasters. But we decided that we needed provide some practical leadership regarding the security of the Jabber/XMPP network, and StartCom (our root CA) has made that task much easier than we could have hoped.[Read More]

Today we issued a Last Call regarding XEP-0178: Best Practices for Use of SASL EXTERNAL. This specification is part of our continuing effort to advance the XMPP RFCs to Draft Standard within the IETF. Although XEP-0178 does not contain any proposed changes to RFC 3920 for inclusion in rfc3920bis, it does document best practices regarding a particular SASL authentication mechanism, in particular the SASL EXTERNAL mechanism as it relates to the X.[Read More]

Today we sent to the IETF updated versions of our proposed revisions to RFC 3920 (“XMPP Core”) and RFC 3921 (“XMPP IM”). For reasons that are obscure to people outside the IETF, such revised documents are called “bis” drafts, so the documents in question are called rfc3920bis and rfc3921bis. These Internet-Drafts incorporate corrections, errata, updates to technologies we use (such as Transport Layer Security), feedback from implementors, interoperability testing results, and general lessons learned since the XMPP RFCs were published in October 2004.[Read More]

Welcome to Extended Conversation, the official weblog of the XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF). Although many members of the Jabber/XMPP community have their own individual blogs (syndicated at Planet Jabber), here we will post news and views from the XSF itself: information about XMPP-related standards work within the IETF, notices about XMPP extensions that have been published or advanced within the XSF, updates about XSF initiatives such as the intermediate certification authority, and more.[Read More]