<abstract>This specification provides canonical documentation of the obsolete Agent Information namespace. Note: This document has been superseded by XEP-0030: Service Discovery.</abstract>
<remark>Per a vote of the Jabber Council, changed status to Obsolete. The protocol described herein is accurately defined but actively deprecated in favor of Service Discovery (XEP-0030).</remark>
<p>Over the years there have been three different protocols used in the Jabber community to discover information about other entities on the network. The most recent protocol, and the only one that is standards-track, is &xep0030;. The protocol prior to Service Discovery was &xep0011;. Before Jabber Browsing, there was the 'jabber:iq:agents' namespace. This specification provides historical documentation for the Agent Information protocol.</p>
<p>Note well that the Agent Information protocol is deprecated; applications desiring such functionality SHOULD implement Service Discovery. This specification is provided only in order to ensure complete documentation of earlier protocols.</p>
<p>The 'jabber:iq:agents' namespace was used to obtain a list of entities associated with another Jabber Entity; most commonly, the list of trusted services associated with a specific host.</p>
<p>When 'jabber:iq:agents' is used, information about available agents properties is contained within a <query/> element that is scoped by the 'jabber:iq:agents' namespace. The reply to a request of type "get" in the 'jabber:iq:agents' namespace contains zero or more <agent/> elements. The <agent/> element has a required 'jid' attribute that contains the Jabber Identifier of each agent. The <agent/> element in turn may contain the following children:</p>
<ul>
<li>name - a natural-language name for the service</li>
<li>description - a short phrase describing the service</li>
<li>transport - inclusion of this empty element signals that the service is a gateway to a non-Jabber instant messaging system</li>
<li>groupchat - inclusion of this empty element signals that the service is multi-user chat service</li>
<li>service - the CDATA of this element specifies the type of gateway (aim, icq, irc, msn, yahoo), the type of conferencing service (public or private), or user directory (jud); these values were never standardized and are not registered with the XMPP Registrar</li>