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Presence & ProtocolAn independent guide to Jabber and XMPP

Layer 02 · History

History: from jabberd to the XMPP RFCs

Jabber becoming XMPP, in order: the 1999 announcement, the 2002 working group, the 2004 RFCs and the trademark still sitting under the name.

A stack of early-2000s printed mailing-list threads and conference notes on a table.

The name Jabber was announced in January 1999. The protocol behind it was handed to the IETF in 2002, standardised as XMPP, and published as RFCs in October 2004. Between those dates sit a server, a foundation, a working group and a trademark, and each of them still shows up somewhere in the vocabulary people use today. This layer lays the sequence out with the dates the foundation itself publishes, and separates what changed from what only got renamed.

In this layer

  1. A single public terminal on a wooden desk in a library reading room, with a coiled cable and a printed guide.

    Free-nets: the accounts volunteers kept alive

    How free-nets ran on volunteer labour, dial up lines and library terminals, and why a federated address still works the same way.

  2. A small FM antenna mounted on a rooftop mast above a residential street at dusk.

    What community radio teaches a federated network

    Long before a small XMPP server asked who may run a node, low-power radio was answering the same question on the airwaves.

  3. An old rack-mounted server in a dim equipment room, a single status light still glowing.

    Digital archaeology on a dead protocol

    A protocol twenty-seven years old has a topsoil of living documents and layers of dead ones beneath it. The dead layers still explain the surface.

  4. A printed RFC document on a library table with passages underlined in pencil.

    Reading the RFCs the way a historian reads a speech

    Most of what is said about the protocol was said by someone who had not just read it. The documents are short, public and worth more than the summaries.

  5. A long paper timeline taped across a wall, years written in marker, notes clipped along its length.

    From jabberd to the XMPP RFCs: a timeline

    Not quite six years separate a personal announcement from an IETF Proposed Standard. Each step is dated, and each one changed something.

  6. A brass rubber stamp and its ink pad on a leather desk blotter, lit from one side.

    Who owns the name Jabber

    Two names, two owners, one network. The confusion is old, documented, and easy to clear up.

Every essay in this layer is written against the reference page on the three stanza types, and two neighbouring layers extend it: Protocol and Servers.