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- CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_
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- Reported by Mark Needleman/U California
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- NETFAX Minutes
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- The Netfax Working Group meeting was held on March 14, 1991 at the IETF
- meeting in St. Louis. The major purpose of the meeting was to discuss
- a proposal submitted by ISI to define a file format for fax using TIFF.
- The idea behind this is that the problem of using fax on the internet
- needed to be broken down into two seperate and discrete tasks. One of
- which would be to agree on a common file format, and separately to come
- to some agreement on a transport mechanism.
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- The thought was that once the file format was agreed on there would be
- enough common agreement in place so that some experimentation could
- begin. Once the experimentation had taken place there could be later
- agreement on what was the best transport mechanism (SMTP or FTP) or
- perhaps multiple mechanisms could be used depending on what made sense
- in a particular enviornment.
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- There was alot of agreement with this basic concept. There was also a
- good bit of discussion on whether TIFF was the best mechanism to use as
- proposed in the ISI paper or whether something using ODA should be the
- mechanism. It was concluded that the group did not have enough
- expertise with ODA to make that evaluation and what was needed was a
- definition of what an ODA encoding for fax would look like so it could
- be compared to the TIFF encoding as presented in the ISI paper. Peter
- Kirstein (P.Kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk) agreed to provide such a definition
- and post it to the list.
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- The ISI paper is available for anonymous ftp from stubbs.ucop.edu as:
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- /pub/netfax/isi-faxpaper
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- A discussion was held over the transport mechanism for actually moving
- fax around the network and whether it should be SMTP or X.400. Dave
- Crocker discussed some of the recent happenings at the Internet Mail
- Extensions (SMPTEXT) Working Group and his feeling that some of the mail
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- header extensions that would be needed should be happening in the near
- future. He also mentioned how these headers would be compatible with
- X.400 whenever possible. This gave the group the sense that the issue
- of X.400 versus SMTP was not all that important since anything done for
- SMTP would most likely be compatible with X.400 headers.
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- Carl Malamud (carl@malamud.com) agreed to look at what headers exit in
- both SMTP and X.400 that could define the type of information that might
- be needed to transmit fax across the network. This will enable us to
- determine if new headers need to be asked for from the SMTP group. It
- was also mentioned that once agreement was gotten on the headers, a
- combination of transport mechanisms could be used including FTP. All
- that would be needed for FTP would be to add the proper headers at the
- beginning of the file to be sent to a fax server. This common
- definition of headers along with a common agreement on file format holds
- out the promise of maximum interoperability among fax servers that might
- be depolyed.
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- Action Items
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- o Peter Kirstein will post to the list, a definition of what an ODA
- encoding would look like. This will enable the group to quickly
- decide on the relative merits of ODA versus TIFF and make a final
- decision by the next meeting.
-
- o Carl Malamud will post to the list, his investigation of mail
- headers. This will enable the group to decide what extensions need
- to be defined if any or whether what already exists is usable
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- o Mark Needleman agreed to separate the netfax mail archives into
- multiple files for ease of downloading.
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- Attendees
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- David Crocker dcrocker@pa.dec.c
- Steve Deering deering@xerox.com
- Ned Freed net@ymir.claremont.edu
- Robert Hagens hagens@cs.wisc.edu
- Russ Hobby rdhobby@ucdavis.edu
- Mike Janson mjanson@mot.com
- Kenneth Key key@cs.utk.gdy
- Peter Kirstein kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk
- Anders Klemets klemets@cs.cmu.edu
- Jim Knowles jknowles@trident.arc.nasa.gov
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- Shelly Knueven shelly@wugate.wustl.edu
- Tracy LaQuey Parker tracy@utexas.edu
- E. Paul Love loveep@sdsc.edu
- Clifford Lynch lynch@postgres.berkeley.edu
- Carl Malamud carl@malamud.com
- Mark Needleman mhn@stubbs.ucop.edu
- Ursula Sinkewicz sinkewic@decvax.dec.com
- Wing Fai Wong wfwong@malta.sbi.com
- Wengyik Yeong yeongw@psi.com
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