Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/ietf/96mar/area.application.96mar.txt

Text File | 1996-05-23 | 15KB | 331 lines

Applications Area


Directors:

o  Harald Alvestrand:  [e-mail]
o  Keith Moore:  [e-mail]

Area Summary Reported by Harald Alvestrand, UNINETT and John Klensin, MCI


This is a short report on the status of the Applications Area as of the conclusion of the Los
Angeles IETF meeting in March 1996.

The Applications Area currently contains the following working groups:

Access/Synchronization of the Internet Directories (asid)
Chair(s):  Tim Howes <[e-mail]>
Responsible AD:  Harald Alvestrand

Detailed Revision/Update of Message Standards (drums)
Chair(s):  Keith Moore <[e-mail]>
Responsible AD:  Harald Alvestrand

Electronic mail read receipts (receipt)
Chair:  Urs Eppenberger <[e-mail]>
Responsible AD:  Harald Alvestrand

Common Indexing Protocol (find)
Chair:  Patrik Falstrom <[e-mail]>
Responsible AD:  Harald Alvestrand

Hypertext Markup Language (html)
Chair(s):  Eric Sink <[e-mail]>
Responsible AD:  John Klensin

HyperText Transfer Protocol (http)
Chair(s):  Larry Masinter <[e-mail]>, Dave Raggett <[e-mail]>
Responsible AD:  John Klensin

This group is jointly supervised with the Transport Area.


Integrated Directory Services (ids)
Chair(s):  Linda Millington <[e-mail]>, Sri Sataluri
<[e-mail]>
Responsible AD:  Harald Alvestrand
This group is jointly supervised with the User Services Area.

Mail Extensions (mailext)
Chair(s):  C. Allan Cargille <[e-mail]>
Responsible AD:  Harald Alvestrand

Mail And Directory Management (madman)
Chair(s):  Steve Kille <[e-mail]>
Responsible AD:  John Klensin

MIME Content-Type for SGML Documents (mimesgml)
Chair(s): Ed Levinson <[e-mail]>
Responsible AD: John Klensin

MIME-X.400 Gateway (mixer)
Chair:  Urs Eppenberger <[e-mail]>
Responsible AD:  Harald Alvestrand

No new groups have been formed in the area since the last IETF.

Two new groups are in the process of being formed:  MHTML, which met as a BOF at this and
the previous IETF, and URC, which met as a BOF at the last IETF, but did not meet at this
time.

No groups have terminated since the last IETF.  One group, MAILEXT, is in the process of being
terminated.

The Apps area sponsored three BOFs at this IETF:
o  Apps/TSV joint BOF on Web-related transport issues * MHTML BOF
o  Early morning BOF on active user agents

A BOF on a MIB for HTML was sponsored by the Network Management Area.

In addition, the Apps area held an open Apps area meeting.

Given the state of the Net today, it is not surprising that intense focus is given to the Web-
oriented groups.  The performance of these groups has been less than stellar in getting things
done within the original time estimates and in keeping up with developments in industry, and
some doubts have been raised on the ability of the IETF to provide leadership in this area.

Nonetheless, the IETF seems to be valued by many as a standardization organization that is not
controlled by any particular grouping, and there seems to be consensus that the IETF should
continue to be a standards organization within this area.

An issue coming strongly into focus now is the question of E-mail security.  Considerable work
was done both on and off the agenda to see what progress could be made on this issue; work will
probably be forthcoming soon.  The main focus of these efforts has been within the Security
area.

The question of managing applications has moved back into focus with the reactivation of the
MADMAN group, the chartering of the APPLMIB group and the HTTPMIB BOF.  This area
will receive considerable attention in the future, and some architectural work should be done
here.


REPORTS ON SPECIFIC WORKING GROUPS


Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

This group has not been making satisfactory progress, primarily due to proposals from multiple
camps.  In areas of controversy, the working group has been unable to agree on widely-deployed
approaches, favoring instead a strategy of waiting for better solutions.

The Monday meeting focused on trying to reorganize and plot a new course.  That course will
focus on standardizing what can be standardized, sometimes involving the IETF at later or
earlier stages in feature design and development than has previously been common.  Relevant
features with broad support or deployment will be moved directly to standards track, with
"versions" being the province of subsequent applicability statements or BCP documents.

The Thursday meeting attempted to complete the work of defining a sensible agenda for the
working group's remaining lifespan, and giving guidance for work to be done in the IETF on other
issues.  The set of conclusions reached was not final.



Electronic mail read receipts (RECEIPT)

The group had not published a new version of its draft since its last meeting.  Nevertheless,
problems with the old draft were discussed, and reasonable consensus was reached on most or all
issues.  The group expects to be finished before Montreal.


HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

HTTP/1.0 has been submitted to become an Informational RFC.  We are focusing on getting a
proposed standard for a new version of HTTP with an aggressive schedule: submission of a
Proposed Standard by May 1.  This schedule will mean dropping some issues and features in this
first standards-track version and considering them for standardization in a subsequent version.
Of top priority are those fixes that will help relieve HTTP-caused Internet congestion: host
identification, caching, persistent connections.

We had formed a number of subgroups to evaluate the HTTP/1.1 draft.  In our two originally
scheduled meetings, we reviewed the subgroup's conclusions and open issues, in the areas of
caching, persistent connections, content negotiation, state management, range retrieval,
authentication, extension methods, and extension methods.  In addition, we also had a lively
and productive interaction with the WTS members where HTTP security work is proceeding,
and a third meeting on Thursday to triage our task list and assign ownership:

http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/HTTP/Issues/http-wg.html

Jim Gettys is now the lead editor.


MIME Content-Type for SGML Documents (mimesgml)

The group reviewed recent mailing list activity and several people reported on off list
conversation.  James Clark and Don Stinchfield have been asked to work to resolve the
extended catalog issues in the exch proposal that James has raised.  Charles Goldfarb has
offerred his help on these issues and suggested that the SGML Open Consortium would be a
better venue in which to discuss that content.  The chair will contact Paul Grosso, the SGML
Open Technical Chair, to get assurance the SGML Open will undertake that work.  The use of
multipart/mixed in exch can be replaced with multipart/related as that will be moved to
standards track as soon as either mimesgml or mhtml reccommends a draft which uses it.


Integrated Directory Services (ids)

An Internet-Draft that is the revision of the X.500 Catalog has been published.  It will be
further improved and progressed as an Informational RFC in April.

A revised draft for the CCSO (Ph) nameserver architecture paper has been submitted.  This
paper will be circulated in CCSO mailing lists for comments and progressed as a standards track
RFC.  A good draft of the preferred practices for Ph directory service will be published by the
Montreal IETF.

The X.500 Root Naming context draft will be revised based on several comments received.  A
new draft edited by David Chadwick will be published when the discussion comes to a closure.

A reference schema for an Internet White Pages Person will be published by April 1st 1996.

The group produced a standard DNS names for network services document that will be further
revised and widely circulated for comments.  A final decision on the track for this document
will be made by the next IETF.

The group has started the work on producing a BCP on directory services.  A good draft will be
published shortly.


Common Indexing Protocol (find)

The FIND Working Group met to discuss the Common Indexing Protocol.  The new co-chair
Roland Hedberg was introduced.  The Group discussed the Data Changed Template, the Poll
Template, and the Centroid Change Template.  They also discussed questions from the mailing
list.  The group decided this work was important to continue within the IETF.


Access/Synchronization of the Internet Directories (asid)

ASID considered the following topics:

o  Drafts for carrying directory info as MIME objects, not limited to a single directory system
o  LDAP version 3
o  Drafts for carrying BER streams in MIME + SOLO reactivation

Of these, the two first ones seem most likely to bring IETF-relevant results.


Mail and Directory Management (madman)

Three documents were reviewed:  Network MIB, Directory MIB, Mail MIB.

Issues were cleanly resolved on: relationship to application MIB; URLs; Traps; Failure
Counting; Group Specification.

The three documents will be revised and finalised rapidly.  This will be the last face to face
meeting of the working group.  There are also expected to be some experimental RFCs arising on
use of Traps.  These can be handled without face to face meeting of the working group.

It was agreed that a message store MIB would be desirable, but this would not be progressed
until a solid proposal was on the table.


Detailed Revision/Update Of Messaging Standards (drums)

The group did not have new published drafts since the last IETF.  Nevertheless, topics that
had been discussed on the list got another airing, and substantial agreement was found possible.


GROUPS WHICH DID NOT MEET


Mail Extensions (mailext)

Mailext, which did not meet at this IETF, currently has one outstanding document: a standards-
track RFC by Ned Freed on the URL external body part.  An experiment has been agreed to
whereby a variation on the format that should raise many of the same issues will be used for
the IETF Internet-Draft document announcements.  If the experiment is successful, a Last Call
will be issued on the document for Proposed Standard status.  If the experiment identifies
problems, the document will be returned to the working group.


MIME-X.400 Gateway (mixer)

This group believes that its two core documents are reasonably complete, and is waiting for
final edits on the largest one before going to Last Call for Proposed with them.



REPORTS ON SPECIFIC BOFS


Joint Apps/Transport BOF on Web-related problems


Text/HTML in Email (mhtml-bof)

Twenty-four people attended the MHTML meeting at IETF 35 on March 4, 1996. We adopted our
Working Group draft charter with minor word changes.  We also addressed and resolved all
items on our meeting agenda.  The results will be reported to the working group mailing list in
our formal meeting minutes prepared for submission to the IETF.  Minutes were taken by Ken
Rossen.

In particular, we tentatively resolved most disagreements about which methods should be used
to convey location reference information about MIME multipart/related HTML body-parts.  The
consensus conclusions of the meeting will be reviewed on the working group mailng list to inform
those not attending, and to document our full understanding of the issues and our resolution.
New draft text is being prepared by Jacob Palme for review via the working group mailing list.
We expect to meet our milestones on schedule.  MHTML Working Group will meet at the 36th
IETF in Montreal.


Open Apps Area Meeting

This was an experiment conducted by the area directors for furthering more cooperation across
groups within the area. Presentations were given by:

o  Jeff Schiller, Security
o  Ned Freed, Email
o  Tim Howes, Directories
o  Larry Masinter, WWW

A lively discussion ensued, with focus points around models for directories and the problems
with E-mail gateways.  Most attendees seemed to think the meeting a Good Thing.


Agents BOF

Agents BOF, 0800-0900 Wednesday, 6 Mar 96.  Conveners: Einar Stefferud, Tony Rutkowski.
This informal BOF brought together IETF attendees interested in agent technology with a view
toward identifying standards areas where the IETF could fill a significant need.  This was
articulated by Tony Rutkowski as co-convenor, who pointed to rapid emergence of intelligent
agent implementations coupled with an IETF draft RFC on URAs, activities in the W3
Consortium-OMG workshop in June, and sessions at the 5th International WWW Conference at
Paris in May.

Leslie Daigle presented draft-ietf-daigle-ura-01.txt on Uniform Resource Agents (URAs), a
Specification.  Her presentation included questions and issues surrounding bounding the
definition of agents, their interfaces, and what the IETF could do.  Peter Doemel discussed
mobile code implementations-in terms of the Telescript implementation, where the paradigm
is remote programming as opposed to remote procedure calls.

Dick Binder urged that the group articulate specific standardization needs for IETF.  Stefferud
urged security concerns and the need for significant attention.  A participant noted that
ISO/JTC1/SC21/WG7 dealing with open distributed processing, had done some work related to
management of distributed processing systems that may be agent related.

There was consensus that the large attendance of 44 signed attendees provided indication that
dialogue should be continued via a mailing list, which Rutkowski volunteered to host.  No
equivalent list was known to exist.


HTTP MIB BOF

(This BOF was convened by Carl Kalbfleisch in the Network Management area, and its report
copied here for completeness)  The HTTP MIB BOF was held Monday in LA at the IETF
meeting.  The minutes of the BOF will be posted to the web site in a few days with an
annoucemnet on this list.

In addition to the BOF, Rui, Dirk and myself meet several times during the week.  I also met
with the chairs of the Application MIB where we came to some understanding of the
relationship between our efforts, MADMAN and sysApplMib.  Finally, I presented an update
of HTTP MIB to the HTTP Working Group.

A quick summary of the BOF (for those who were not in LA) is that I have been asked to work
with Ned Freed (Editor for MADMAN) and Jon Saperia (Chairman Application MIB Working
Group) to develop a document which outlines:

o  requirements for web server management + usage scenerios for existing MIBs
o  specifiy types of remaining objects needed

Following the release of this document, the IESG will assess whether a
Working Group will be formed within the IETF.