&gt; Better to have a standards body than a hodge-podge of uninteroperable things.<p>XMPP has both in spades -- that&#x27;s where the theory doesn&#x27;t meet the reality. And XMPP is hardly alone; this is a chronic issue with messaging, because the problem space is so ill-defined.<p>The most successful protocols have been extremely focused in scope. IPv4 is essentially unchanged from RFC 791. TCP has a very carefully curated set of options that has stayed small. For ~15 years, RFC 2616 was the only spec you needed for HTTP. Notice the layering here -- those protocols don&#x27;t try to be everything for everyone, unlike XMPP&#x27;s catch-all design.