On Wed Nov 7 09:27:49 2007, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
As always, what are the use cases?
If XML is black-and-white, I see:
1. Include a little dab of color -- an emoticon, a PNG avatar, a
thumbnail for a file, a small inline image for whiteboarding, or
whatever (something less than 50k and perhaps less than 10k). Here
Base64 might be all we need, via data: or cid: URLs perhaps.
Yes, base64 is acceptable here, although bear in mind that over a
charged-by-transfer medium - such as many mobile phone tariffs - that
100k image is transferred as 133k, and 33k that you didn't really
need to transfer sounds like an additional cost we could drop if we
had the technology to do so. It's not a driver for it, though, I
agree.
2. Attach a larger color sketch -- a file, the image for which a
thumbnail is a representation, or whatever (50k to 1M?). I think we
use
HTTP-PUT (perhaps via WebDAV) and jabber:x:oob, with IBB as a
fallback.
Right, we're into "would be very nice" territory here. 333k (or
thereabouts) is a noticable chunk on my mobile bill, and it's around
11 seconds of time on my (256k uplink) DSL.
3. Send a huge color canvas -- a music file, a podcast, a video, or
whatever (1M+?). I don't know what we use for this.
Once we're into filesharing, then yes, we need either a binary
streaming protocol (A binary variant of IBB), or else we want to ship
the data out of band.
There's also a use-case you seem to have forgotten, which is the
reason I raised this now:
4. XTLS and similar encrypted server-mediated client-client streams.
To send these via a peer-to-peer session negotiated via XMPP - like
Jingle - strikes me as losing a fundamental benefit of XMPP, but it's
also much cheaper in terms of bandwidth than sending them via the
server right now.
I personally feel that if we're to say that XMPP truly supports end
to end encryption, we need to ensure it's of near-equal cost to the
current way of doing things.
Dave.
--
Dave Cridland - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] - xmpp:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
- acap://acap.dave.cridland.net/byowner/user/dwd/bookmarks/
- http://dave.cridland.net/
Infotrope Polymer - ACAP, IMAP, ESMTP, and Lemonade
