Comment by xorcist

What is the purpose of layering your chat protocol over another protocol at all?

SMTP has no "base protocol" in this sense. HTTP, nothing (unless you count RFC 822).

It's hard to think there protocols would have had the same life time if they were based on XML, JSON, or protobufs. (Yeah, HTTP over XML, that should be enough to give you nightmares. But welcome to DAV and XMPP.)