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

From: Graham Klyne <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 20:46:28 +0100

At 10:35 06/04/99 +0200, Herman R. Silbiger wrote:

>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.

With respect to capability identification, that is not my understanding.

The underlying media feature registration (RFC 2506) permits registration
of new feature tags with "IETF consensus" (per RFC 2434), a process
selected precisely because it is considerably more streamlined than
chartering a WG.  The syntax document (RFC 2533) defers to RFC2506 for
feature tag registration.

The one area that might need some thought is the Internet fax feature
schema document:  this document explicitly does not prohibit the use of
_any_ registered feature tag, but it does aim to set out a base vocabulary
(RFC 2531, section 3).

In order for new fax features to be introduced in a well-coordinated
manner, the schema document might need to be updated.  (But I note that the
framework has been designed with the idea that new features can be
introduced without a requirement for their universal recognition.)

I shall readily defer to the opinion of IETF procedural experts, but I
would expect that an updated schema document (or a schema extension
document) could be prepared quite quickly, and then either (a) progressed
to standards track as an individual (or ITU?) submission without WG
formation, or (b) a WG formed with the sole purpose of reviewing and
presenting the updated schema as a proposed standard.  Either way, I would
anticipate a timescale much less than a year.

#g

------------
Graham Klyne
([email-masked])