Is it safe to say Jabber support in OSX 10.4 (Tiger) is not all its cracked up to be? Apple did a good thing embedding Jabber support in not only the client (iChatAV) but also the OSX 10.4 server. But according this article it certainly sounds like it.
Apple chose to leave a few other pieces of Jabber functionality out of its client as well: Though it's able to use them if they've already been set up on another Jabber client, there's no option within iChat to do the service discovery needed to access Jabber gateways.
Off the back of this, iChat users have been sharing hacks around the gateway problem.
Whether iChat offers the ability to register with Jabber gateways or not, iChat users have been busy figuring out how to use third party clients to sign on to public servers, register with those gateways, then return to using iChat.
It was also noted by developer Missig, that iChat diverges from the XHTML-IM specification. Apple are using some kind of rich text which will need to be hacked or reverse engineered to allow for compatable applications elsewhere.
Yes before people start, most of these things are nitty picking and yes if Microsoft even dared to do anything like this it would likely be so far removed from the standard. Not that Jabber will ever come to the core of Windows ever, specially with Microsoft fully behind the Sip/Simple specification.
