Editor's note: These minutes have not been edited.
Minutes
MIMESGML Working Group
35th IETF, Los Angeles, CA
Tuesday, 5 March at 1930-2200
Chair: Ed Levinson
Minutes: Pete Resnick
The original agenda was suspended. It had been to discuss, in turn, what it took to make each of the two proposals, encap and exch, workable. As a proponent of only one of the proposals was present it did not appear to be a useful exercise. Instead the working group reviewed the current status and activity.
Terry Allen summarized the recent mailing activity and noted the participation of James Clark. Mr. Clark's participation served to recenter the the discussion. Some progress is being made now. Mr. Allen noted that we sometimes find the discussion in the collision zone between IETF and SGML.
Ed Levinson reported on some off-list work. He requested James Clark and Don Stinchfield cooperate to resolve the issues with the exch proposal that Mr. Clark identified. These relate to features in encap but not in exch. Mr. Levinson has gotten a response from Mr. Stinchfield and is waiting to hear from Mr. Clark. Charles Goldfarb has offerred to participate in that effort. John Klensin requested Ed Levinson contact Paul Grosso, Technical Chair of SGML Open, to have SGML Open take on developing an agreement for the content of the extend catalog contents being proposed in the exch proposal. Mr. Levinson agreed to do that.
The possibility was raised to rewrite exch to be independent of SGML Open Catalogs. Reservations were expressed, particularly not to have the IETF be a party to actually defining SGML. Instead we should work toward getting the SGML Open folks to move on this.
The problem was raised of dealing with references to [the sender's] local files that are not included in the message. Two proposals were suggested, changing those local references to global (public identifiers) or indicating via a parameter that the document is "clean", i.e., has no local references.
The use of Multipart/Mixed in the current exch draft was discussed. John Klensin said he had pushed for that initially, but that might not turn out to be a good thing. Current mailers, he said, "flatten" Multipart/Mixed. Multipart/Related will go to standards track when an application that uses it goes standards track; the same for the content-id URL draft.
Clark Anderson discussed the application of distributed catalogs to whois++. Maybe transport can be done with MIME or an index server could solve the problem. Mr. Anderson ask if this was applicable to the problem. Mr. Klensin observed that this may be an external catalog.
The work of the HTML in email group was explored. That work was considered to be a special case and not generalizable.
