Comment 109 for bug 296867

I've been tracking this bug over the years and am very happy to hear momentum is gaining. I'd humbly like to put forward a use case that may or may not affect how the implementation is performed.

I regularly use OTR via Pigdin to securely communicate from a jabber account through a private jabber server then through a IM gateway to many AIM, MSN and Yahoo accounts (required by work). This is one of the areas where OTR shines as it is protocol independent. One of the reasons that OTR managed to gain popularity is its entire protocol is wrapped in the text that is transferred between users (read as, "it just works"). It manages to avoid all sorts of complexity and issues by staying entirely out of the existing IM protocols including any sort of server side changes or support.

Adding encryption into the jabber protocol (XTLS/Jingle) doesn't help unless there are encryption and federation standards that are supported across all IM protocols and i'd imagine that would be harder to get implemented than this bug. =)