> In addition that it is currently used for two different purposes:

Actually, it looks like three purposes: time since last online, idle time 
(clients), and current uptime (servers/components). 

> 2. Discover when a connected user was last active at the server. (The XEP 
> calls it idle time, which would be some kind of server access idle time if i 
> read it right)

For clients XEP-0012 says that idle time is based on human interaction with the 
client. From section 4:

> If the user's server delivers the IQ-get to one of the user's available 
> resources, the user's client MAY respond with the idle time of the user 
> (i.e., the last time that a human user interacted with the client 
> application)."


As for the proposals:

> Purpose 1) can be done using presence + delayed delivery, like described at 
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6121#page-54. This would automatically use 
> absolute time.

+1. If it's handled appropriately in the core RFCs, no need to duplicate it in 
a XEP. 

> Don't think 2) is the semantic we ever wanted. Under idle time I understand 
> the time someone has been away from his machine/device. The most common way 
> to detect this is missing input (keyboard/mouse/touch). In my opinion neither 
> XEP-0012 nor XEP-0256 describe such behavior.

That looks to be what XEP-0012 and XEP-0256 already prescribe, but given the 
overloaded meaning of terms in XEP-0012, +1 on simplifying.

> That's why I propose to use a new protocol, like this 
> https://dl.dropbox.com/u/14672346/xmpp/extensions/xep-0256-replace.html .

My only suggestion for the proposed replacement is to just go ahead and name 
the element <idle /> instead of <last-interaction />. It's shorter (good for 
presence data) and the intent (user has been idle since) reads nicely. 

This leaves the third use case for server/component uptime reporting uncovered, 
but that seems like something that should be done via adhoc commands like other 
statistics reporting, and probably already is.


-- Lance

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