TechWiki

Welcome to the TechWiki page for sharing ideas, policies and conventions for new wiki pages.

For further detailed information, please contact

Pavlix, MattJ or stpeter.

Main Objectives

 * Create and maintain a Knowledge Base for XMPP standards and software
 * Document the XMPP technology in general terms and link to XMPP Extensions
 * Provide software compatibility information
 * Summarize new ideas, proposals and plans
 * Gather information coming from the mailing list discussions

Specific Goals
There is not a well-organized place to share long-term information about XMPP standards, software and technology. Mailing lists are full of repeating discussions that could be avoided if the information is available online.

Relax the mailing list traffic
writing the suggestion/issue (again and again) to the mailing list.
 * Add a section to an article about the topic and link to this section instead of
 * For longer texts use separate pages (or subpages of your user page, if not sure) and again, post links to interested parties and a mailing list.
 * Document current behaviour and current issues in the wiki pages so that interested people easily find them. Point other peoples to it whenever they ask.

Keep relevant information together

 * Information will be organized into logical sections to allow easy navigation.
 * General pages and categories will be used to bind related information together.

Open communication

 * Mailing lists are too time-consuming for some people, even those who may bring significant value to the XMPP community.
 * XMPP software developers, users and other interested parties can edit the wiki pages as long as they don't deliberately break policies or good behaviour (XSF membership not required).

Page Categories

 * Category:Technical Pages discuss particular topics and related XEPs.
 * Category:Software Pages discuss software and its features.

Note that we discourage creation of per-XEP pages as they don't add any particular value. Wiki is for describing the XMPP technology in whole. That means we prefer to have a page about File Transfer to have one page per filetransfer extension, for example.

Similarly, a page about Jingle will include references to all related XEPs (while some of them will be referenced also from Voice or File transfer), as well as a software compatibility table.

This is to improve usability of the XMPP Wiki and may later become part of the Wiki Policy.

Templates
Wiki pages with similar purpose should be structured as uniformly as possible. Here is the list of such templates.
 * Technical Page (Template) - about a general technical topic
 * Software Page (Template) - about a software product

Work in progress
You can help populating the wiki pages. Here is an informal list of current efforts.


 * Define templates and conventions
 * Start techpages on various topics (see below).
 * Move techpages from xmpp.org to the wiki and improve them
 * Start software pages about servers, clients, components and libraries.

There are several hot topics to answer.


 * Core Protocols
 * Jingle - the Jingle peer-to-peer technology
 * File Transfer - about file transfer extensions in XMPP
 * Voice - voice over XMPP, audio codecs and related
 * Video - video over XMPP, video codecs and related
 * End-to-end security - a specific security-related topic
 * Transport Layer Security - TLS use
 * Message Acknowledgements
 * Client Authentication
 * Multi-User Chat - proposals and extensions related to conferences
 * Anti-spam Techniques
 * Data Limits
 * XML Streams

And also several general topics to summarize XMPP features.


 * Security - links to various security topics
 * Reliability - reliability issues, solutions and proposals in XMPP
 * Encryption - uses of encryption in XMPP
 * Interoperability
 * Extensibility
 * Internationalization

Software-related articles too.


 * Servers
 * Clients
 * Components