Paul Johnson wrote:
> I'm just saying the client-side approach to multi-protocol
> support is ass-backwards in general and usually results in a client that
> whose support of half a dozen clients is the world's least funny joke,
Personally I see it the other way around. My experience with Jabber is
that it is the world's poster child of the crappiest IM experience ever.
Every time I touch it I get pissed off enough to want to throw very expensive
hardware across the room. At that point I uninstall it, fire up GAIM (or
Kopete, or Trillian) and, hey... it works. Not only does it work, it works
well enough for my needs which is to keep in touch with my friends who have
decided to spread across 4 different networks. Jabber has never.. *NEVER*...
worked.
> whereas if you let the server handle the connections to the obsolete networks
> (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, IRC) you get a client that does one protocol really
> really well, and transports that work increasingly well over time.
That work increasingly well? I'd settle for "at all". No, this is the
backwards part in the same way that the whole email paradigm is backwards.
Every other client connects to multiple servers. But here you think it is
sensible to have a client to connect to a server which is... uh... a client to
other servers! *YEAH!!!* That works! That's doing one thing well! YEAH! Not.
> Multi-protocol clients violate the "do one thing and do it well" design
> principal. There's no way to fix this critical bug in all multiple protocol
> clients without just discontinuing them entirely.
No, they embrace it. They do one thing well, IM. The lameness of Jabber
breaks that notion by trying to do two things at once.
A: be an IM server.
B: be a multiplexing IM client for multiple downstream clients.
That's a recipe for suckage. Jabber's horrible track record bears it out.
> Quantify please. I use the IRC transport on a daily basis without issue.
And funnily enough I use multi-network IM clients daily without issue.
--
Steve C. Lamb | But who decides what they dream?
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | And dream I do...
-------------------------------+---------------------------------------------
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature