Editor's note: These minutes have not been edited. AREA REPORT, APPLICATIONS AREA, LA IETF Area Summary Reported by Harald Alvestrand/UNINETT and Keith Moore/UTK This is a short report on the status of the Applications Area as of the conclusion of the Montreal IETF meeting, June 1996 The Applications Area currently contains the following working groups: Access/Synchronization of the Internet Directories (asid) Chair(s): Tim Howes Responsible AD: Harald Alvestrand Common Indexing Protocol (find) Chairs: Patrik Faltstrom Roland Hedberg Responsible AD: Harald Alvestrand Detailed Revision/Update of Message Standards (drums) Chair(s): Chris Newman Responsible AD: Harald Alvestrand Electronic Data Interchange-Internet Integration (ediint) Chair: Rik Drummond Responsible AD: Harald Alvestrand Hypertext Markup Language (html) Chair(s): Eric Sink Responsible AD: Keith Moore HyperText Transfer Protocol (http) Chair(s): Larry Masinter Dave Raggett Responsible AD: Keith Moore This group is jointly supervised with the Transport Area. Integrated Directory Services (ids) Chair(s): Linda Millington , Sri Sataluri Responsible AD: Harald Alvestrand This group is jointly supervised with the User Services Area. MIME-X.400 Gateway (mixer) Chair: Urs Eppenberger Responsible AD: Keith Moore MIME Content-Type for SGML Documents (mimesgml) Chair(s): Ed Levinson Responsible AD: Keith Moore This group is currently in suspended state, pending work being done in SGML Open. MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate HTML Documents (mhtml) Chair: Einar Stefferud Responsible AD: Keith Moore Mail And Directory Management (madman) Chair(s): Steve Kille Responsible AD: Harald Alvestrand Receipt Notifications for Internet Mail (receipt) Chair: Urs Eppenberger Responsible AD: Harald Alvestrand Two new groups have been formed in the area since the last IETF: MHTML and EDIINT. The MAILEXT group has been terminated since the last IETF. The Apps area sponsored six BOFs at this IETF: * Workshop report on Web indexing (INDEX BOF) * Application Configuration Access Protocol (ACAP BOF) * Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP BOF) * Fax over Internet (FAXNET BOF) * DIS Large-Scale Multicast Usage (LAMUG BOF) * Uniform Resource Names (URN BOF) A predominant theme at the conference was an exceedingly large number of new work items that fit more or less clearly within the Apps area. These include suggestions for work on filesystems (Microsoft and SUN), userdatabase managemet (NIS+, Sun), IRC (Micosoft), calendaring (a panlopy of companies) and workflow in general, in addition to the official BOFs listed above. It is unclear whether the Apps area has the human resources needed to tackle all these new challenges in a coordinated manner, while keeping the necessary eye on the cross-coordination between the working groups. Some old problems are also coming back onto the table; the problem of stable, resolvable names for objects (URNs) has been off the official agenda since Dallas, but is now coming back in force, seemingly with greater clarity of purpose and greater hope of achieving consensus. It is still unclear how the division of labour between the IETF and the Web Consortium is to be handled; at the moment, there seems reasonable consensus that the IETF is the right place to work on improvements to the current HTTP protocol, while little energy to work effectively on questions related to higher level issues like HTML seems to exist in this forum. CROSS-AREA ITEMS Little happened in the E-mail security field since the last IETF. A new specification, for embedding PGP in MIME, has moved onto the standards track; apart from that, little IETF work has been done. In the management area, work has been done within the Area Directorate to discuss problems related to application management, but no official IETF work has been started, apart from the things that go on in the APPLMIB group. Cooperation with the Transport area is increasingly important; the LAMUG BOF and MMUSIC seem to straddle the boundaries between applications and transport; file systems may also be hard to place. Reports on specific working groups These are the groups that met at the IETF. Access/Synchronization of the Internet Directories (asid) labeledURI and pgp attribute drafts to be revised and submitted for proposed standard. LDAPv2 drafts have been revised and will be submitted for draft standard after Harald sends suggested text clarifying T.61 encoding. application/directory draft to be slightly revised, then submitted for proposed standard. LDAPv3 was heavily debated, with much discussion of dynamic attribute support, typeless DNs, miscellaneous features, and X.500 relationship. Detailed Revision/Update of Message Standards (drums) Milestones were adjusted, SMTP, RFC822bis, and ABNF open issues were discussed and a number of the issues reached concensus. Electronic Data Interchange-Internet Integration (ediint) Only eight people from the BOF had been involved in the ietf-ediint@imc.org mail list discussions taking place since February 1996. Additionally, of the 50 or so attendees 6 were people with EDI background. Much time was spent to ensure people understood each other. The direction received is: + KISS, + Consider tackling receipt in a later phase + Consider the use of X12 acknowledgment (997), thereby not doing RFC1892 type receipts Our requirements paper, the first deliverable, is due in mid July. Review should put to rest many of the concerns from the BOF. Receipt Notifications for Internet Mail (receipt) 70 participants, 25% claimed to have read the draft. Reviewed open issues in draft-ietf-receipt-mdn-01.txt All issues agreed, text will be generated by July 12th, new draft by July 31st. Submission to IESG in September, 2 month later than in the charter. EDI experts showed interest in the work but will generate their own multipart/report type to carry signed reports. No other work items are left close enough to the charter to be moved into the working group and justify new drafts and more meetings. Therefore no additional meeting of the group is expected. (Vacation and change-of-address notifications have shortly been addressed. Maybe someone is enthusiastic enough to take it up and write something.) Common Indexing Protocol (find) During the meeting, the new view of the CIP protocol, described in the new I-D written by Jeff Allen, was presented. The new view is to create a basic protocol which can transfer different index-objects, i.e. remove all bindings between CIP and Whois++ by removing even the defintion of a centroid from the basic protocol. The view of the wg was to continue with the work on this new view, specially look at two specific domains - white-pages and documents - and what index objects are needed. As an immediate action-item the wg agreed on the need for _one_ document describing the CIP. HyperText Transfer Protocol (http) A few last-minute issues arose with HTTP/1.1. These will result in a new draft by next week, with minor changes. Digest Authentication is ready for progressing to proposed standard now; state management (cookies) will require a new draft and then will be ready for IESG last call. The working group reviewed the other work that had been deferred for HTTP/1.1 and created a new schedule in which we complete all HTTP/1.2 work and closing down after a possible final meeting in December. Work in progress includes: PEP for general protocol extensions, transparent content negotiation and user-agent features, sticky headers, short names for headers and context identifiers, and possibly some additions for requesting hit-counts from proxy caches. Integrated Directory Services (ids) The IDS WG meeting was long and fruitful. Here are the highlights: + + The DNS aliases paper will be tightened up and progressed as a BCP + The Finding Stuff needs more work and the authors will continue work + A BCP paper on directory will be finalized shortly and sent out for comments + The common schema paper will be improved and submitted as an Informational RFC + The paper on CCSO Architecture will be progressed as a DS RFC after one more pass + The X.500 Catalog will be finalized and published as a Info. RFC in a month or so + The Nomenclator paper - SNQP -- Simple Nomenclator Query Protocol will be published as an Informational RFC + The Internet Nomenclator Pilot paper will be revised and published as an Experimental RFC + The Root naming Context paper for X.500 will be published as an Experimental RFC by early September + The only workitem that needs attention is a preferred CCSO practices document MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate HTML Documents (mhtml) The WG completed the substanial work on the following drafts: draft-ietf-mhtml-spec-00.txt, draft-ietf-mhtml-info-00.txt, draft-ietf-mhtml-related-00.txt, and draft-levinson-cid-02.txt with full consensus, and handed it over to an editing team to verify its accuracy and fix any errors according to the decisions of the WG. All these drafts will be republished as revised. The WG will announce WG last call for the drafts in preparation for requesting IESG last call for adoption as a proposed standard. Groups which did not meet MIME - X.400 Gateway (mixer) The documents are in the last stage of review. + draft-kille-mixer-rfc1327bis-03.txt + draft-ietf-mixer-bodymap-05.txt No additional meeting for MIXER is planned. Hypertext Markup Language (html) The I18N document is being reviewed for Proposed Standard. The group will be closed when this document is finalized. Mail And Directory Management (madman) The documents of this WG are nearly finished, and are expected to be sent out for last call shortly. Reports on specific BOFs Workshop report on Web indexing (INDEX BOF) This BOF reported on the outcomes of a Distributed Indexing/Searching Workshop sponsored by the World Wide Web Consortium, held May 28-29. Schwartz discussed the workshop motivation and structure, a proposed distributed indexing framework that arose from the first day's discussions, and the recommendations of three breakout groups that divided up parts of this framework to describe areas where participants felt standards were needed. After the report, Schwartz opened the floor for discussion about what liaisons might be appropriate with IETF Directory groups, or any comments, questions, etc. The discussion was brief, mostly involving suggestions and clarifications. This BOF was intended to be informational (rather than to kick off a new working group in the IETF), and it was felt that the work is not yet ready to be brought to the IETF until concrete proposals are available, but that it is desirable to coordinate the various efforts (whether they happen in the IETF, WWW Consortium, or elsewhere). Application Configuration Access Protocol (ACAP BOF) There is enough interest for a working group, some concerns about overlap with other protocols which need to be addressed, and the charset issue needs to be solved for the protocol. Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP BOF) The NNTP BOF met to determine the interest in requesting the creation of a working group to create a replacement document for RFC977 that would clarify ambiguities in the original document, add a specific mechanism in the protocol to allow the NNTP server to list the extensions that it supports, develop a mechanism for the addition of standardized extensions to the protocol (in a manner like the process being used and developed to extend SMTP) and review existing extensions for possible inclusion in the replacement document as part of the basic functionality of this revised NNTP. There was considerable interest in having the working group created for this purpose. There was also interest in pursuing standardization for new extensions to NNTP that are not yet part of existing practices. Discussion list: ietf-nntp@academ.com. Subscriptions can be sent to the request address at ietf-nntp-request@academ.com. Fax over Internet (FAXNET BOF) A Birds of a Feather session was held to explore interest in forming a working group to enable operation of one or more Internet-based facsimile-related services. Attendance was good; so was interest. Discussion resolved the focus of the potential working group to be first determing the list of fax-related Internet services that are plausible (such as email-to-fax gateway), second determing an ordered list of desired services and requirements, and third specifying the mechanisms which will enable those services. There was good consensus that the activities of the working group should focus on immediate facilities, using as much existing mechanism as possible. Further discussion (and formulation of a working group charter) will take place on the mailing list that can be subscribed to at ietf-fax-request@imc.org, with the word 'subscribe' in the body. DIS Large-Scale Multicast Usage (LAMUG BOF) The LArge scale Multicast Usage BOF presented and accepted a charter for a Large Area Multicast Environments Working Group. The charter was read and the milestones presented and accepted. Two informational RFCs are expected to be produced, and a brief outline for each was presented. In addition, two informative reports were given, as well as a synopsys of the semi-reliable transport protocol work being conducted at GMU. Uniform Resource Names (URN BOF) Two related I-D's were presented that describe work following on from that reported at the Dallas URN BOF. This work was put forward as part of a concrete plan to tackle the URN problem. A third I-D was presented that outlines some very real technical issues with one of the proposed drafts. The consensus in the room, at the end of the session, was that there is material here that we can work with to yield concrete solutions in a year's timeframe. That is, the solutions are not yet carved in stone, but the issues can be defined and the feeling is that they can be addressed and there are people willing to work on them. So, we will go ahead with efforts to firm up a proposed charter and milestones, with a view to starting a working group. _________________________________________________________________ Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no Last modified: Tue Jul 2 11:02:03 1996