Real-time user-to-user web with Mozilla and XMPP

Although the web was formally born as a set of connected documents, spatial metaphors of “location”, “address”, “site” have always harbored in the minds and the words of its architects and users. Whether real or conceptual, unexplored “places” do not stay so for long, and what used to only host passive information is now habitat to communities and dialogues.

For us to really get the feeling that we share conceptual places with others, though, one leap has to be made—to simultaneity, where interaction between you and me (be it me commenting on your article, you showing me your bookmarks) is a continuous perception, not shreds of dialogue tightly managed, and tangibly deferred, by a server-mediator. The technical means of representing ourselves to each other have to become sophisticated enough to be invisible.

We present a way to extend the browser with XMPP, a real-time communication and presence protocol. Users can load web pages as usual, but certain pages, rather than end points in a conversation with a server—i.e. applications—are middle ground in a conversation between users and their contacts—application spaces.

Application spaces can host activities where one or more parties interact in a structured way, from the simple chat to collaborative document authoring, shared presentations, whiteboarding, and so on. Traditionally, such activities have been supported through fat clients, and the difficulty of deploying the same client to all interested parties has severely limited their adoption and evolution. Here, instead, the successful model of the browser is followed: while it remains possible to create XMPP logic on the client through browser extensions, emphasis is on having a generic communication layer locally, and hosting specific functionality remotely, where it can be developed with standard web technologies (HTML, CSS, Javascript, any server-side languages if desired, SVG, XUL), evolved quickly, deployed easily, and accessed with a click.