CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_


Reported by Mark Needleman/U California

NETFAX Minutes

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.



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.



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.



The ISI paper is available for anonymous ftp from stubbs.ucop.edu as:



     /pub/netfax/isi-faxpaper



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.



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.



Action Items



   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

   o Mark Needleman agreed to separate the netfax mail archives into
     multiple files for ease of downloading.


Attendees

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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