In October we mentioned that  XEP-0258, the specification describing a common approach to labelling messages within XMPP, was entered into Last Call – a state of formally requesting any comments prior to moving the specification to Draft state.

XEP-0258 (which was authored by Kurt Zeilenga, an Isode engineer, and which is supported in M-Link and some third party clients and servers) has now moved to Draft status. The XMPP Standards Foundation describes Draft status as:

A Standards Track XEP is in the Draft state after it has undergone extensive discussion and technical review on the Standards list and has been voted forward on the standards track by the XMPP Council.

Note: Once an XMPP Extension Protocol has been advanced to a status of Draft, it is expected that the specification will be basis for widespread implementation and for deployment in production environments…..

The next step will be to move XEP-0258 to Final status, which can only happen after it has been in Draft for at least 6 months.

For a full description of this important XMPP extension, see XEP-0258: Security Labels in XMPP.