Subject: COMMUNICATION To ISOC/IETF Facsimile Working Group on STREAMLINED HANDLING OF TERMINAL TYPE

From: "Herman R. Silbiger" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 10:35:59 +0200

COMMUNICATION
TO: ISOC/IETF Facsimile Working Group
CC: ISOC/IETF Applications Area Director,  ISOC/IETF Liaison with ITU,
ITU Liaison with ISOC/IETF,   ITU-T SG 13
APPROVAL:  Approved by SG 8
FOR: ACTION
DEADLINE: 1 September 1999
CONTACT: Mr. David H. CROCKER Tel: +1 408 246 8253U.S.A. Fax: +1 408 273
6464 Email: [email-masked]
______________________
Summary:
 ITU-T Study Group 8, Question 4, wishes to utilize the efforts of the
ISOC/IETF Fax working group, to facilitate on-going synchronization of
the facsimile-over-email work being developed by ITU-T and ISOC/IETF.
Terminal Characteristics

The ISOC/IETF Fax working group is responsible for developing technology
that permits emulation of facsimile service, through the existing
Internet email infrastructure.  The quality of a hybrid service, which
utilizes components from the ITU-T T.30 GSTN-based facsimile service and
the Internet email facsimile emulation service, is facilitated by close
synchronization of the technical details between the two services.

The ITU-T T.30 service is regularly enhanced to permit new terminal
characteristics, such as additional resolutions and two-sided printing.
Incorporation of such characteristics into the current ISOC/IETF
facsimile-over-email specifications appears to require the full
involvement of a newly chartered, developed, reviewed and approved
ISOC/IETF standards effort.  An effort of this type can take as much as
one year.

Question 4/8 requests that the ISOC/IETF working group on facsimile
explore creation of procedures which permit incorporation of new
terminal characteristics more quickly.  It appears that this would
require changes to RFC 2301, for file format, and RFC 2531, for
facsimile capabilities format. One possibility is to create procedures
for addition of extra-standards registration of new characteristics,
through the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

---

From: "Larry Masinter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 12:13:59 PDT

> through the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

Can someone explain what this is really about? The procedures
are already in place.

RFC 2506 ("Media Feature Tag Registration Procedure") already
establishes a mechanism by which new media features can be
registered; while RFC 2531 ("Content Feature Schema for Internet
Fax") is a baseline, there are no apparent restrictions in
any of the protocol documents (e.g., RFC 2530, "Indicating Supported
Media Features Using Extensions to DSN and MDN") to using
ONLY the RFC 2531 feature tags.

It was set up this way explicitly, to allow ITU to register
new capabilities, as well as allowing vendors to register
their own proprietary extensions (in the same way that
vendor-specific NSFs are registered), support the use of PDF,
or whatever.