What is the difference between Disco Info (#info) and Disco Items (#items) in XMPP?

Question

I've been attempting to read XEP-0030 Service Discovery but found the language pretty opaque.

My question is simple: What is the difference between the disco#info spec and the disco#items spec?

My guess is to say that disco#info is the request and disco#items is the response but that does not seem to match up to the way I am interpreting the documentation.

Answer 1

Basically:

• #info is used to discover information about a XMPP entity.
• #item is used to discover items associated with a XMPP entity.

#info query results will show you amongst others the supported features of a XMPP entity (e.g. XHTML-IM support).

#item query results will show the available items of a XMPP entity. For example the XEP-0045 MUC component of a XMPP service. But any other available service/component could show up here.

One could also say that #info is used to query the features of this particular entity, while #items is used to query for "sub-components" of that entity, which itself are usually be queried with #info for their features.