The Jabber world is a diverse place, with lots of services, transports, software agents, users, groupchat rooms, translators, headline tickers, and just about anything that might interact on a real-time basis using conversational messages or presence. Every JabberID (JID) is a node that can be interacted with via messages, presence, and special purpose IQ namespaces. Some JIDs are parents (such as transports), and often many JIDs have relationships with other JIDs (such as a user to their resources, a server to its services, etc.). We need a better way to structure and manage this culture of multi-namespace JID stew. The answer: Jabber Browsing.

Note well that implementors are encouraged to implement &xep0030; instead of Jabber Browsing.

One of the concepts in browsing which helps to extend the interaction between JIDs is a "JID-Type", a simple heirarchy for identifying the role of any JabberID that is similar to the mime-type format. Many programmers are comfortable with the concept of identifying file types by mime-types, which use the format "category/type". A JID-Type, once discovered, is to be used in the same way that a mime-type would be for a file, to alter the user interface representing that JID or provide alternative functionality for interacting with it (either automatically or driven by user interaction). The following categories and types are proposed as the canonical list for the purpose of JID-Types:

Historically each category was used as the name of an element, and the type was an attribute, such as ]]>. The proper expression for all new implementations supporting this specification is to express the type information as attributes on a generic item element: ]]>. When processing returned browse information this new syntax should always be handled first, and the old syntax only used if it is important to be able to access older implementations.

Additional unofficial categories or types may be specified by prefixing their name with an "x-", such as "service/x-virgeim" or "x-location/gps". Changes to the official categories and subtypes may be defined either by revising this document or by activating another specification. Removal of a category or subtype must be noted in this document.

The namespace containing the Jabber Browsing data is jabber:iq:browse. The primary element within this namespace is 'item' (again, historically every category listed above would also be an element).

The first important use of jabber:iq:browse is to replace the jabber:iq:agents namespace. When a client connects, it may optionally browse to the server to which it connected in order to retrieve a list of available services. The resulting iq might look like the following example:

To determine any further details from this list, each child would have to be browsed. The elements within the icq service are only hints to a client for building user interface elements. The icq.jabber.org service would still need to be browsed in order to determine any relationships or additional namespaces. This top-level list is the master "services" list available from the server, and should be used for any default functionality when available. This list could also serve as the "home page" for a page-based browsing user interface.

A client should not just blindly request browse information every time the user requests it, rather, a client should cache the browse results based on JabberID. Any display or use of the browse data should then be returned from the cache. This model is similiar to that of presence.

There are no security features or concerns related to this proposal.

This document requires no interaction with &IANA;.

No action on the part of the ®ISTRAR; is necessary as a result of this document, since 'jabber:iq:browse' is already a registered protocol namespace.

The 'jabber:iq:browse' namespace has been in use for quite some time. However, live browsing still needs to be better defined by a generic publication/subscription system. It is assumed that when such a system is defined, updates to this document will be made. It is, however, possible that no futher changes to jabber:iq:browse itself may be needed.