The issue of getting transports firm is a given. Blocking? Well this might therefore suggest a personal server to provide the transports after all...but with account details held centrally to enable multipoint access with one logon.
Tim
A personal server still does not account for how alien the existing 'legacy' protocols are. Whether the handling of protocols is done locally or remotely, you would still be creating a 1-to-1 mapping of remote system features to jabber protocol. This includes having support for things like many-to-many conversations for MSN, to a talk-like groupchat for ICQ (assuming they still use that), to IMVironments for Yahoo. Even if you map the wide range of message formatting options to xhtml on the inbound, you would still need a way to represent the remote user's formatting capabilities to the Jabber client.
Once you start tightly coupling protocol for talking to IM users based on their network provider, the only advantage you could gain from having a transport is language neutrality - you will have to maintain compatible versions of jabber clients to the transports. Since these aren't packaged together, it becomes an issue that my client might support the version of the MSN bindings provided by a service provider, but not the version of the ICQ bindings.
The reason that the transports aren't considered by many to be the 'focus' of the jabber community is that dealing with all these technical incompatibities as well as legal and political actions from the legacy system providers will limit the amount of work that can be put into enhancing our own protocol and implementations.
The limited amount of effort the community is capable of can either be focused either on supporting existing functionality in legacy systems, or we can add genuinely new functionality like group calendaring and events. In the end, it is a choice for individuals rather than of the group. However, the state of things today could be taken to represent where the majority interest lies.
-David Waite
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