One distinguishing characteristic of Jabber technologies from their earliest days has been the existence of gateways (also called "transports") between the Jabber network and legacy instant messaging services such as AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger. Surprisingly, the recommended behavior of such gateways, including the protocol elements used by a client to interact with a gateway, has never been fully documented. This document attempts to fill that void by codifying best practices for gateway interaction.
+One distinguishing characteristic of Jabber technologies from their earliest days has been the existence of gateways (also called "transports") between the Jabber network and legacy instant messaging services such as AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), ICQ, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger. Surprisingly, the recommended behavior of such gateways, including the protocol elements used by a client to interact with a gateway, has never been fully documented. This document attempts to fill that void by codifying best practices for gateway interaction.
Note well that this document defines protocol usage with regard to client proxy gateways, i.e., gateways that "masquerade" as a client on a non-Jabber IM service. Gateways that perform direct protocol translation without proxying for an account on a non-Jabber service are not addressed in this document. Furthermore, this document does not define any interaction between a gateway and the non-Jabber service, only interactions between a Jabber client and the gateway. Although what happens on the other side of the gateway is highly dependent on the nature of the legacy service, gateways should at least provide a common interface on the Jabber side of the gateway so that Jabber clients can be written in a consistent fashion.