> you can't use the Jabber protocol by hand over telnet like you can use POP3, SMTP, IRC. There's an intriguing view that text can't be used by hand either - y

> you can't use the Jabber protocol by hand over telnet like you can use POP3, SMTP, IRC. There's an intriguing view that text can't be used by hand either - you have to use a "text shell". Wouldn't a fair comparison use an "XML shell"? If it knew the schema, it could even autocomplete/intellisense for you, showing you the available choices at that point... it's pretty cool how XML has factored out the grammar of a language, in a reusable way. I don't know the Jabber protocol, but the difficulty I've experienced with web-based XML protocols (web services) is that the http header needs the length of the message, which is hard to do by hand - it's not due to XML (and a "http shell" would fix that...)