I've been using ejabberd a lot lately and it's a really nice piece of software, and works very well. My biggest problem with XMPP as a whole is... well, it's X

I've been using ejabberd a lot lately and it's a really nice piece of software, and works very well. My biggest problem with XMPP as a whole is... well, it's XML. Not only is it heavier than it should be across the wire, it feels to me that the XML way of thinking leads to unnecessary verbosity when designing protocol messages. And there seems to be no proper consensus on how to use it among the different XMPP RFCs -- do we re-use a node name or come up with something different? Or just make it an attribute? Do we namespace it? XMPP works great for what it was designed for though. There are many robust client and server implementations, being able to federate is awesome, and it's pretty easy to extend. But if I were to re-invent it, I would use a binary transport format.