Subject: Notes from fax meeting (quick summary)

From: Claudio Allocchio <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 19:35:26 +0100

Hallo,
Here is a quick summary of the discussion held on Monday at the FAX WG 
meeting in Minneapolis. The detailed minutes will follow soon, and 
presentations will be posted on the IMC web site for Internet fax.
(http://www.imc.org/ietf-fax/) 

As usual, thanks to Graham Klyne for preparing the base for this report!

Claudio Allocchio
FAX WG co-chair

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The first topic pointed out at the meeting was "where is our new 
charter?" From a brief check with the ADs we discovered that something 
went wrong into the process when the new charted was submitted last June 
2000. Thus we decided to re-submit it now, and also to update its 
milestone section with the current updated data. The new updated charter 
was thus immediately re-submitted to ADs at the end of the meeting.

Status of draft standard:
- TIFF-FX: technically the draft is OK, but there are possible Adobe IPR 
           problems. Curently the question has been escalated by the ADs 
           at IAB level (see John Klensin comments later).
- Addressing: technically there are no objections, but some small 
    comments and fixes requests from the ADs were submitted to the editor 
    during the meeting. There are no problmems in introducing then into the 
    drafts, which will be updated according to these comments, by next 
    week, and will directly go into the final approval process.
- Service document: the document is stalled due to the lack of DSN 
  "draftstandard" status. It was decided to go anyhow for the WG last-call 
   (ADs agree) and submit the document for approval. Publication could not 
   happen until DSN dependancies are resolved, but this is expected to 
   happen soon.

John Klensin on TIFF-FX Adobe Concerns:  this WG has done its job.  The
solution to the IPR problem involves some work betwen IETF, Adobe and
maybe others parties (Xerox?) to resolve the issues.  The working group
should not allow itself to be diverted by this non techcnial issue.  If
that's not true, someone should stand up and say it now. 

At the meeting was also present Scott Foshee (Adobe): he said that there are 
some concerns that need to be resolved (I speak that silence is not 
regarded as acceptance), and Adobe and IAB are working on them.

Implementers' guide (informational):
- One editorial comment at end of last call period.  Being a purely 
  editorial matter, no new last call is required and the document will be 
submitted for publication.

Targeted for draft standard:
- gateway-protocol
- gateway-options

Larry Msinter said that there seem to be many conformance requirements
that could reasonabl be left as advice to implementers, expecially
concerning the use of "logs" and their format.  Were any particular
criteria used for selecting requirements vs advice?  He suggested to
consider the use of "MAY"  instead of "SHOULD" for issues not related in
interoperability Claudio Allocchio pointed out the a good reason for
specifying the log formats may have something to do for keeping logs for
message tracking, and Larry commented then maybe strengthen to achieve
interoperability: it was also noted that there are privacy related issues 
about logs, execially in Europe. Ohno-san suggested to use syslog (or secure 
variant) for messaging logging. The editor received all the commetns and 
is going to prepare new versions according to them.

FFPIM:

Negotiation:  we need to make reference to registry and procedures for 
updating with new features.

Timely:  there were no special comments about it.

ESMTP-based content negotiation (CONNEG): should we define additional
channel for doing content negotiation in SMTP session, rather than using
MDN extensions?  Then the server must know everything needed about the
addressee.  This could be specified as an appendix to this document. 
Larry reminded that previous attempt was pushed back because of assumed
presence of firewalls and Dave Crocker considered that the gateway would
be presumed to act for the endpoint. Ned Freed (AD) noted that this
extension is different; there are real concerns that this will be
unimplemented in the real world, but this is something that should 
stop its psecification for the time beeing, provided that it 
doesn't create difficult-to-solve problems for later. 

Negotiation and Timely delivery:

Graham Kline presented the satus of the documents: apparently the're are
very few comments in the last weeks, thus they seem ready for final
publication. The WG did no objection to this. Larry suggests that
content-type should always be included in alternatives offering.  and
Graham replied that this only needed when a non-TIFF file format is being
used. 

Fax processing status:

The chairs asked whether this should be used with EIFAX or FFPIM.  There 
is no clear orientation in the people present in the room. The question 
will be taken to the mailing list.

Terminal mode:

The main reason for conceiving the "terminal mode" is the key complaint 
against existing EIFAX, etc: it seems that the all other 
methods introduce a serious complexity/size of implementation.

Terminal mode protocol:

Same as document raised in ITU-T. It relates to the same principle: 
emulate over the Internet the end to end capabilities of G3 faxes.

Gateway mode: the editor believes that terminal mode can be extended to
operate with gateways.  Gateway may operate in real-time or
store-and-forward mode. 

The editor also asked the WG if "terminal mode" documents and proposal 
should be merged with FFPIM?  They're very similar in principle, but 
all the specifications are different currently.
The WG jhas no current clear indication about this. There is the 
possibility to consider the merge, but the question will go back to the 
mailing list.

TIFF-FX extensions 1:

As Lloyd could not attend the meeting, Tamura-san presented the slied 
with the latest changes.

Questions should go directly on the list, to reach the editor.

Milestones review:

Some discussion of merging Terminal mode proposal into FFPIM, which would 
delay FFPIM.  General feeling was uncertain, more inclined to take FFPIM 
forward as-is to lessen risk of uncontrolled delays.

There was some discussion of the charter, particularly whether TIFF-FX 
extensions were explicitly adopted into the charter.  A proposed charter 
containing this work was posted to the list on 14-Jun-2000, but seems to 
have subsequently got lost in the system.  The current published charter 
for the WG is very out-of-date.