On Friday 30 September 2005 07:13 pm, Tijl Houtbeckers wrote: > The protocol is not documented quite that officially yet
Lately I've been messing around with iChat on my LAN, and I wrote up some notes about how it works here: http://lists.affinix.com/pipermail/delta-affinix.com/2005-September/000419.html I don't know how much of this is known or not, but maybe you guys will find it interesting. Since Multicast DNS has a very "pubsub" quality to it, using it for presence makes a lot of sense. Overall I think the Apple protocol is actually pretty good, and it goes way beyond what I would have expected from a company. For once, a protocol has been designed based on existing standards in the first place. That saves the opensource community a lot of work. :) My only critique is that I don't see a clear way to extend the presence data (since <presence> stanzas are not used). Maybe we could come up with some mapping of some common Jabber presence extensions to TXT strings, or find a way to just send presence XML over mdns (not as insane as it may sound! iChat already tosses around multi-kilobyte GIF avatars over mdns). -Justin
