> Therefore my conclusion is that the reason e.g. slack usage x1000 what my old IRC or Jabber cliënt used, isn't technical. It's a deliberate choice made for reasons of budget, time to market or another trade-off.
That was never not the case.
Jabber makes a big usage of XML, which back in the day was very much seen as overkill. It requires a pretty complex parser, and increases the amount of data considerably.
They could have gone with a much more compact binary protocol with ID/length/value pairs, where there's not even field names, but say, a 16 bit integer where IDs are allocated from a central registry.
Even going back to DOS, you could shrink a program with measures like outputting "Error #5" instead of "File not found", and require the user to look up the code in a manual.
That was never not the case.
Jabber makes a big usage of XML, which back in the day was very much seen as overkill. It requires a pretty complex parser, and increases the amount of data considerably.
They could have gone with a much more compact binary protocol with ID/length/value pairs, where there's not even field names, but say, a 16 bit integer where IDs are allocated from a central registry.
Even going back to DOS, you could shrink a program with measures like outputting "Error #5" instead of "File not found", and require the user to look up the code in a manual.