ralphm.net

ralphm's blog

Friday, 30 January 2004

XMPP Core moves to Proposed Standard

We're getting there!

Today, the IESG approved the XMPP Core Internet Draft as IETF Proposed Standard. Hooray!

XMPP, or the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, is the IETF formalisation of the protocol upon which Jabber is based. XMPP is currently being defined by 4 draft documents, of which XMPP Core and XMPP IM are the most important ones. Having these documents as Proposed Standards is a major milestone for the Jabber community, and, expecting XMPP IM to reach Proposed Standard status soon, one big step into the wide adoption of Jabber.

I want to congratulate everyone involved with Jabber with this approval, and especially offline offlinestpeter because all his hard work on these documents is finally starting to pay off.

Jabber Rocks!

Wednesday, 21 January 2004

Nuclear again

Enhancing stylesheets to match

As I mentioned before, the sources of this blog are in Docbook XML. I try to mark up my texts with as much semantics as Docbook gives me. Every now and then, just like today, I use tags which are not recognised by my stylesheet yet. For my previous entry, I added command, filename and superscript.

Thanks Joe!

Nuclear

How do you pronounce that?

Thanks to hildjj, the only word I've picked up from the State of the Union so far, is the word nuclear. Apparently a hard to pronounce word, but it also proves difficult to display the pronounciation in my browser.

no͞o'kl-ər

If you have recent Unicode fonts installed, you should be able to see the above. It didn't render correctly for me, and after a bit of searching, I found the Junicode font set which contains the right glyphs for the combining diacritical marks such as the COMBINING DOUBLE MACRON, also known as U+035E.

Placing the fonts in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/junicode, running fc-cache and restarting my browser worked nicely for me.

Now if only a certain president would read this...

Tuesday, 20 January 2004

Jabber Africa goes live

Lighting up the Dark Continent

Yesterday, the brand new Jabber Africa Foundation launched its public Jabber server, for the benefit of (southern) Africa. Congratulations!

Still, looking at the the Jabber World Map, Africa was the only continent without any presence. So I signed up the Executive Director of the Jabber Africa Foundation, Bruce Cohen, to be the first, with hopefully many to come.

Tuesday, 6 January 2004

Happy 5th Birthday, Jabber!

Time flies...

As offline offlinestpeter mentions in the 16th issue of the Jabber Journal, it has been 5 years since the Slashdot story on 4 January 1999, in which jeremie announced the existence of Jabber. To all involved with Jabber since then: congratulations!

Although I wasn't involved with Jabber at the very beginning, my years of experiencing Jabber have been pretty exciting. I have seen Jabber grow, attract lots of both developers as users, and I even helped develop Jabber Enhancement protocols. Just like stpeter and hildjj I find it intellectually stimulating to think of (new) uses of Jabber. Everywhere. I hope to think of, and test out, more of that the coming year and beyond.

Jabber rocks!