[ogpx] HTTP(S) and XMPP as transports of OGP application layer messages

[Infinity Linden <[e-mail]>]

Hey people!

So... looping back around to some of the comments from the f2f BoF meeting...

Original work with OGP used HTTP(S) to carry application messages.
There's been enough talk about alternate transports that it feels very
bad to dismiss them without discussion. However, I'm wondering if
there's anyone out there planning on implementing OGP over XMPP?

The reason I ask is that a number of us who worked on the early
pre-IETF interop trials are heavily invested in HTTP(S). Though i
can't speak for everyone involved, i would anticipate resistance to
mandating a new transport. HTTP(S) has it's weaknesses as a transport,
to be sure, but it's a well deployed and well understood protocol with
a mature tool chain. This makes it attractive to many people.

On the other hand, if someone else thinks they want to produce an OGP
implementation over XMPP, that seems really cool. But if no one's
going to implement it, an argument could be made that putting the
effort into specifying it would be a waste of time. On yet another
hand, going through the exercise of figuring out what aspects of HTTP
are required to transport OGP messages might reveal subtle
dependencies between components. Back on the other hand again, can we
do this without re-writing BCP56?

So I was thinking of this as a proposal:

If there is strong interest in implementing OGP over XMPP, let's
mention that it's an "officially supported" transport in the charter.
(for some definition of the words "officially supported.")

If there's not strong interest in implementing OGP over XMPP, let's
not put it in the charter.

In either case, I think there's sufficient justification for
describing the set of requirements OGP makes on it's transport. For
instance, does it REQUIRE request/response semantics? (i.e. - if i'm
writing a compliant server layering OGP over XMPP, and i receive an
OGP "request" in an XML stanza, am i REQUIRED to send a response?)
Or... does it REQUIRE specific content negotiation semantics? (i.e. -
do we need to explicitly describe or reference a technique for
identifying the content type of a response in XMPP?) Or... does the
protocol explicitly depend on caching behavior of some HTTP proxies?
if so, how? etc. etc.

-sincerely
-meadhbh