CURRENT MEETING REPORT

Reported by Peter Resnick, Qualcomm, Inc.

Minutes of the MIME Content for SGML Documents Working Group (MIMESGML)

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 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 that James Clark and Don Stinchfield cooperate to resolve the issues that Mr. Clark identified within the exch proposal. These relate to features in encap but not to any of those 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 so.

The possibility was raised to rewrite exch to be independent of SGML Open Catalogs. Reservations were expressed, particularly in relation to not having the IETF act as a party in 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 it 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 is true 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 asked 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.