Applications Area Report
43rd IETF - Orlando, Florida, US
December 1998
Patrik F�ltstr�m <[email protected]>

Summary
-------

The Applications Area is today fighting with two problems. The first
is to close down all working groups which are close to be finished,
or have finished but have one small draft left on their table. The
amount of work needed is not negliable, and the working group chair
need a lot of support in this phase of the liftetime of a working
group. Maybe change of chair is needed in some cases -- as the one
running the group from the beginning might be one which have energy
to start work, and have new ideas on the architecture -- but not the
energy to become a "bad cop" at the end of the lifetime?

The second peoblem is the division of the working groups, and issues
they work on, in two different camps (or maybe three -- where the
third has not really started yet):

+ Working groups which create new protocols using basic building blocks
  like TCP and UDP etc
+ Working groups which create new protocols using other building blocks
  like HTTP, LDAP, XML and other "buzzwords"
+ Working groups which work on creations of the hammers that are used
  by group number [2] (I see this group different than [1] as they need
  to have more "usage considerations" in their papers)
+ Liason with other organizations {W3C,OMG,ECMA,Java,WAP,ISO,...} which
  might be the problem behind some of the hammers and screws that is
  invented (see above).

There is a discussion in many working groups wether a new protocol
[1] should be created or old building blocks should be used. We see
some "naive" people which use path [2] just because they happen to
have an HTTP library, LDAP library or such -- and does not really
know what the protocol can NOT be used for. For example, the lack of
a global root in the LDAP world make global searches in LDAP not
possible, even though non-directory people might at first glance
think that is possible. This is one of the reasons LDAP need to be in
group [3] and have much more applicability statements written.

In other cases, reuse of protocols, and use Applications Level
Protocols as building blocks in other protocols makes sense. Reuse of
MIME-encoding of body-parts have been happening for a long long time,
and reuse of HTTP makes sense in some cases.

The trouble for people seem to be when to use what.

Some of this descision can only be made when thinking about scope for
the protocol itself. Knowing the scope (and security considerations
regarding if nothing else privacy matters) makes it possible to look
at implications to the Internet as a whole (i.e. transport matters).
Because of this, the Applications ADs have in several cases asked for
review of some work by the Transport Area.

The discussions regarding this kind of division of the Apps Area
between new protocols and reuse of others has probably just started.
When one have a hammer in ones hand, everything around looks like
nails -- even though some of the things are screwes or even china.


  Patrik F�ltstr�m & Keith Moore
 Area Directors, Applications Area




Summary of the various working groups (summaries available dec 22)
written by the respective WG and BOF chairs:

ACAP WG

ACAP: we're having a design meeting tomorrow, in which basically the goal
is to change a few "MUSTS" to "SHOULD"s or possibly "MAYs". This is based
on implementation experience, and the goal is to reduce the complexity of
minimal implementations. The base document had to have a few things fixed,
anyway. Chris and I are also working at clearing the decks for list last
call of the residual required datasets specified in our charter, so we can
finish up the WG for good. These are just minor administrative details,
imho, but I'll report any significant changes after the fact, again FYI
since this isn't even at BOF level.

APPLMIB WG

All of our work items are complete.  Working Group last call has been
completed for some time and all technical review issues related to the
WWW and Application MIB review performed at Berts direction have also
been been resolved.  Corrected Drafts have been available for some weeks
now. The documents will be forwarded shortly from the O&M area where
they have been reviewed, to the Applications Area directors for final
review and approval as Proposed Standards.

CONNEG WG

       The group discussed draft-ietf-conneg-syntax-03.txt and agreed
that it could be put into working group last call after the
incorporation of the edits recently discussed on the mailing list.
The group also approved a minimum set of values for the proposed
color: tag, which will be incorporated into a new revision of
draft-ietf-media-features for the IESG's review.  After the syntax
document is sent to last call, we hope to close out all three
documents,in time for the January 24th ITU deadline. The group
discussed further cooporation with the W3C's CCPP group, and agreed
that the current draft will be the basis of future disucssion, to be
lead by Franklin Reynolds and Graham Klyne.  A tentative author was
also identified for a future draft on the question of registered
feature sets.

DASL WG

We currently have three Internet Drafts representing the three milestones
that we set out for ourselves. At the meeting in Orlando we spent basically
the first half on the requirements document, of which the biggest suggested
change was to make less confusing the definitions of MUST, SHOULD (we will
probably convert the various requirements into "ratings"). The folks
attending the meeting also appeared to think that support for a NEAR
operator is also crucial. We spent the remaining time on the protocol
document and discussed some of the bigger recent issues such as support for
structured properties, I18N, etc. I am expecting to do a last call on the
requirements document at some point in January after one more revision.

DRUMS WG

ABNF to Draft status is in WG last call, will go to IESG for last call after
revision for editorial changes by end of next week.  Message Format draft
will go to WG last call immediately and will go to IESG last call after one
more revision for a few wording clarifications (Jan 8th).  A new draft of
the SMTP spec will come out by end of next week and will go into WG last
call.  WG rough concensus that controversial changes to drafts at this late
date must be supported by at least four people prior to consideration.
Intention is that there won't be another DRUMS meeting.

FAX WG

The meeting began with a review of the results of the last ITU Study Group
8 meeting held in November.    At that meeting, a draft amendment of T.37
was "determined" for the full mode; the technical details are specified by
reference to the "eifax" Internet Draft, as well as the "reporting
extensions" and "fax-feature-schema" documents.   The ITU needs RFC numbers
and copies of the final documents as soon as possible as part of the
approval process, which is targeted for completion in April 1999.   There
are three completed drafts "Goals", "eifax" and "reporting-extensions".
The latter two documents will be submitted to the IESG once the
"fax-feature-schema" document is complete.   The schema document was
reviewed by the authors and a new version will be posted after the meeting.
 It was agreed there would be a final one week Last Call on this document.
 The status of three documents referenced by "eifax" from the CONNEG
working group was reviewed; all but the "syntax" document are in review by
the IESG.  The group also reviewed additional charter milestones and
supported updating of the simple mode RFCs, an implementor's guide and
documents on onramp/offramps.   An updated set of charter milestones will
be posted after the meeting.   There were various interworking activities
for the simple mode and TIFF profiles which were reviewed.   In Japan, 8
companies tested simple mode implementations.  In San Jose, 13 companies
tested simple mode and about 4 companies tested TIFF profiles; almost all
features of RFC 2305 are supported in multiple implementations.   A new IPP
over fax concept was also presented briefly and a mailing list is being set
up which is a separate activity from the Fax WG.

HTTP WG

The HTTP Working Group has completed its work. We have issued
final drafts of the HTTP protocol specification (in two parts),
and we are waiting for A-D review and IESG balloting. We're hoping
to see the HTTP RFCs issue and the working group close soon.

IMPP WG

The IMPP working group met Monday Night (Dec 7th, 1998).  After a brief
review of the current version of the charter, Jonathan Rosenberg presented
his suggestion that SIP could meet the requirements of the working group.
Vijay Saraswat presented AOL's TOC protocol, explaining that we might be
able to learn something from a protocol that, though inadequate, is in a
similar space.  (Vijay does not work for AOL and was not involved in the
development of implementation of the TOC protocol.)  Marc Horowitz briefly
described Zephyr, another system that offers lessons but is at the same
time not adequate to meet our needs. Jesse Vincent presented an overview of
the state of consensus and difference on the mailing list as he and Mark
Day interpret it.  This presentation led to many comments.

Comments lasted until 9:30, with input from Dave Crocker suggesting that
modified versions of e-mail technology could solve many of the problems,
Frank Dawson suggested that the group consider using vCard technology for
content passing, and many others.  After the session wrapped (at 9:30) many
people, including a number of members of the security community continued
in informal discussion.  Another 2 hours were spent discussing and defining
security expectations of an IMPP based system.

IPP WG

Around 40 people attended. Many people from the Internet Fax group were
present.

In consultation with the Application Area Director the following IPP WG
documents have been submitted for acceptance as Informational RFCs, to meet
the market requirements for a set of stable specifications.
They collectively define IPP/1.0:
*    draft-ietf-ipp-req-03.txt
*    draft-ietf-ipp-req-rat-04.txt
*    draft-ietf-ipp-req-mod-11.txt
*    draft-ietf-ipp-req-pro-07.txt
*    draft-ietf-ipp-req-lpd-ipp-map-05.txt
A decision from the IESG can be expected in early 1999.

Discussion about update of the charter. This was not considered necessary,
but the following remaining tasks within the current charter were
identified:
*    IPP URL Scheme
*    Security solution using TLS (with or without use of SASL)
*    Notifications
With these additions, IPP could progress to the standards track.

Presentation and discussion of combining Internet Fax and IPP.
Keith Moore suggested to make preparations for a separate IETF WG on this
subject, and plan for a BOF in the next IETF meeting. 10+ people indicated
that they are willing to participate in this work. This work is also of
potential interest to the ITU.

LDAPEXT WG

The mandatory-to-implement discussion has concluded with the choice of
MUST DIGEST-MD5 (derived from HTTP digest) and MAY on Start TLS, and
the drafts have completed last call and will be sent to the ADs to
progress to Proposed Standard.  The language tags and dynamic entries
drafts which had gone through last call many months ago have also been
sent to the ADs for PS, and the simple paged draft for informational.
Five drafts, virtual list view, sorting, X.509 SASL, C API and ACL
requirements are currently in last call, and no showstopper problems are
anticipated. There was concensus that the access control model draft, which
defines operations on access control elements, was the right approach to
continue.  There was also concensus to add to the charter a new work item to
investigate the use of families of entries to represent compound attributes,
based on a proposal being done for X.500.

LDUP WG

Chris Harding opened by describing related work going on in The Open
Group and offered an open-ended invitation for all LDUPers to attend.

We then reviewed the outstanding drafts. The author of the replica
requirements draft was not present. There are some open comments on
this draft; we will try to get it into WG Last Call no later than the
end of January. The LDAP Architecture Draft is proceeding well, with
some discussion continuing on low level features. We will try to align
the participants and issue a revised draft by the end of January. The
LDUP Replication Information Model was published and discussion is
just starting.

The LDUP Conflict Detection and Resolution Draft was delayed due to
work overload by the author, but will be release by the end of next
week.

As far as the remaining drafts, the LDUP Replication Information
Transport Protocol  is due by the end of January; the LDUP Mandatory
Replica Management draft is still in need of coauthors, and an
estimate for the various Replication Profile drafts depends mostly on
the Mandatory Replica Management draft and the Conflict Detection and
Resolution Draft. Co-authors were committed to this draft, and a
"drafty draft" was promised for Minneapolis.

NNTPEXT WG

This meeting concentrated on ietf-nntpext-base-07.txt. It was decided to
drop the manditory space following commands in the ABF section of this
document. It was also decided that the current dicussion about article
numbers would be retained. Should USEFOR actually include the "Replaces"
header in their RFC, it may be necessary to review this, but that's unlikely
to occur before this new NNTP base spec is forwarded to IESG. Ian King will
spend some time contributing more to the "Security Considerations" section
of this document. Tale will contribute more clarification and examples to
the wildmat section. These clarifications will address Internationalization
and the use of the recently added ! operator.

TRADE WG

       There is no objection to the publication of
draft-rfced-info-blinov-00.txt, referred to the WG for comment, as
Informational.  On the main v1.0 protocol document, there were no
objections to the decisions at the Tokyo WG meeting and there was
agreement to re-target the draft to Proposed rather than
Informational.  There was also support for possibly publishing updated
modular subsets of this large document based on implementation
experience.  The HTTP Supplement will be updated and probably needs
another round of comments.  There was a lot of interest in the list of
known planned v1.0 implementations.  There were no objections to some
delay in starting the next version specification but there were
suggestions that it be v1.5 instead of v2.0 since it will be mostly
upward compatible.  The suggested additional work item of
cataloging/standarizing HTML Form Field names for commerce had
essentially no support so, unless something unexpected happens, I
would not expect to put it in a revised charter.  There were no
objections to the scheduled con calls and WG meeting Feb 8-11, 99.  I
reserved some time for discussion of taxation and there seemed to be a
consensus that some optional hooks should be included but not much and
not soon.  I'll probably submit a revised charter soon showing changed
milestones are documnt target status.

URLREG WG

URLREG did not meet at IETF 43; the chairs felt that issues has been well
discussed at previous meetings.  Nonetheless, both chairs have received
input from WG members expressing dissatisfaction with the current procedures
draft.  The chairs met with the AD and discussed a strategy for
restructuring the document to set forth (known) process for registration in
the 'IETF' tree, and guidelines for creating alternative trees.  The author
will submit the new draft to the list, and unless there is strong sentiment
that another meeting is necessary, will submit it to Last Call before
Minneapolis.  The group's other deliverable, the guidelines draft, is
already in Last Call and is considered complete.

URN WG

The URN Working Group is not meeting at the Orlando IETF.

The WG is down to the final review of the remaining documentation.  There
are minor changes required to some documents.

  URN Namespace Definition Mechanisms
       Has been last-called by the IESG for BCP.

  URI Resolution Services Necessary for URN Resolution
       Somewhere between IESG & RFC editor on its way to Experimental

  A URN Namespace for IETF Documents
     Work required:
       . final concordance with Namespace Definition Mechanisms
         paper (if changes necessary)

  NAPTR Registration Procedures document
     Work required:
       . wg last call

Following on to the proposal to move the NAPTR work to the standards-track,
we have two new Internet-Drafts:

   Resolution of Uniform Resource Identifiers using the Domain Name System
   (draft-ietf-urn-dns-rds-00.txt)

   The Naming Authority Pointer (NAPTR) DNS Resource Record
   (draft-ietf-urn-naptr-rr-00.txt)

These are essentially a split of RFC 2168 into a document defining
the NAPTR RR, and a document describing a URN RDS using NAPTR.

WEBDAV WG

The WebDAV WG met on Thursday, December 10, 1998, from 1300-1500, with 42
people in attendance.  Three main topics were discussed: advanced
collections goals and protocol (<draft-ietf-webdav-collection-protocol-02>
and <draft-ietf-webdav-collection-reqts-03>), versioning
(<draft-ietf-webdav-versioning-00>), and issues from the distributed
authoring protocol (<draft-ietf-webdav-protocol-10>).  There was a brief
discussion at the end of the meeting on additional properties (draft was not
submitted in time for the meeting). Prior to the main meeting, two informal
breakout sessions were held on the topics of Access Control and Advanced
Collections.

Judith Slein led discussion on Advanced Collections, discussing the issues:
- What mechanism should be used to disable the referential capabilities of
reference resources
- Optional backpointers
- Enforcement of referential integrity

Geoff Clemm led discussion on versioning.  A versioning goals document will
be out soon. During the meeting these issues were discussed:
- Data model for a versioned resource
- Whether checked-in resources are mutable/immutable
- Semantics of checkout
- Use of lock as a mechanism for checkout

Jim Whitehead led discussion of the following issues from the distributed
authoring protocol document.
- URI vs. URL distinction in draft
- Storing attributes submitted in XML properties
- Namespace consistency

DRP BOF

The Domain Registry Protocol BOF meet on 8 December to consider the
formation of a working group for specifying a protocol to permit domain
name administrative acclivities between registrars and registries.  A
candidate specification <draft-crispin-srs-00.txt> has provided a basis for
technical discussions.  Online discussion is at [email protected] and
already surfaced a paradigm issue between "light registrar" and "heavy
registrar" architectures.  The basic distinctions between these
architectures was reviewed, along with other domain name service basics.
Categories of service requirements were reviewed, and a draft working group
charter was discussed.  There appeared to be strong group consensus to
proceed with a working group, although there is concern about its meeting
an aggressive schedule.  Such a schedule would be helpful to parallel
activities, outside the IETF, but the area director advice was to focus on
technical work rather than working groups status.  Discussion of
requirements surfaced concerns over flexibility and security.  These will
be pursued further on the mailing list.  The BOF chair would like to note
that this BOF provided an excellent opportunity for a difficult meeting,
given the history of the topic, but that all participants in the meeting
were extremely constructive.

HTTP/NG BOF (Transport / Apps)

It was a bimodal result: great interest (strong consensus, probably
unanimity) in desire for standards track MUX specification, interest (rough
consensus) in a requirements document for something like HTTP/NG's middle
layers, but no interest in standards track work at the middle and higher
levels of the HTTP-NG proposal at this time.

[Comment from Area Director: Much of the transport part of this is
being folded into the RUTS followon in Transport Area (the MUX stuff
that is)]

IKSTEL BOF

IKSTEL BOF discussed the Internet Kermit Service and various
approaches to correcting the current Telnet Authentication/Encryption
situation.  The was no consensus as to the formation of a Working
Group at the end of the meeting.  Further discussion will take place
on the [email protected] mailing list including the posting of a
proposed charter for a working group to tackle the Telnet Auth/Encrypt
issues.

John Klensin is going to visit Columbia University in January to
discuss the Internet Kermit Service with myself and Frank da Cruz.

My personal opinion is that given the dynamics of the meeting that a
quick review of the current Telnet Auth, Encrypt, Auth mode, and
Encrypt mode drafts should be done by myself and Ted T'so and they
should be submitted for Last Call in order to formalize what is
already in use.  Then a WG if it is created can address only the
question of whether something further needs to be done.

LASER BOF

Three "competing" I-Ds, already fairly similar in the relevant areas, were
summarized by their authors.  It was agreed, modulo some details which the
minutes should reflect, that the differences should be hammered out on the
list.  As this was not expected to take long or be controversial, it was
agreed that this would be attempted, in the hope (and expectation) that
a WG would *not* need to be formed.  There was strong consensus to keep
the scope narrow, focusing on local e-mail aliasing only.  There was also
strong consensus that doing this at all was a Good Thing.


SIEVE NON-BOF BOF (did not meet officially)

The Sieve non-BOF BOF met and made some minor revisions. The most
significant issue was reject-behavior for scripts that required certain
extensions; a suggestion was made, argued for, and rejected to allow
conditional processing of messages based on the presence or absence of
specific extensions. This being resolved, we agreed to issue version 6 of
the draft based on a list of accumulated revisions, and all existing
experimental implementations will be brought in compliance with this draft.
A web page is being set up as well to provide a medium for posting scripts
from various authors to check against different implementations. Attendance
was good for something that had only been barely set up: 28 by my count,
and the meeting was poolside 8-).

You are viewing proxied material from ftp.icm.edu.pl. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.