@mcc the other historical story here that I can offer is that the xmpp pubsub spec (xep-60) was around 350 printed pages. I sat down with Peter Saint Andre and @hildjj at OSCON in 2007 and we wrote out a minimal profile of the spec in Notepad.exe that was two printed pages including example XML stanzas. That "tiny spec[k]" formed the basis of the functional pubsub Interop that @ralphm and I implemented between Twitter and Jaiku, basically over one evening at Social Web FooCamp.
oblomov