CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_


Reported by Mark Needleman/U California

NETFAX Minutes

The Netfax Working Group met at the IETF meeting in Santa Fe.  The main
goal of the meeting was to go over the Internet Draft on a file format
for transferring bitmapped images in the Internet.


   o The Internet Draft was discussed and revised at the meeting.  The
     proposed changes plus others that had been discussed on the list
     will be incorporated into the document and it will be put out for a
     short review again as an internet draft.

   o Consensus was reached at the meeting that, provided there are no
     technical objections to the new version of the document, after the
     review period of a couple of weeks end, the document will be
     progressed to proposed RFC status

   o A discussion was held as to what should be the future work of the
     group, if anything, now that the document on file formats was
     nearing completion.  It was brought up that at earlier meetings
     there had never been any consensus achieved on how to go forward on
     any of the other ideas the group had discussed and that maybe the
     group should not attempt to pursue anything further for awhile
     until everyone had a cleared idea of what work was needed and how
     to do it.  However it was decided that the group should at least
     make one more attempt to define some of the issues and problems in
     things like addressing and routing that had been discussed at
     previous meetings.  Dan Newman agreed to take some work he had
     previously posted to the list on this and expand it and repost it.
     It is hoped that this will become the basis for something that
     could be turned into an RFC discussing these issues and proposing
     solutions.

   o A discussion was held on building interoperable implementations
     based on the file format now that the document has become
     standardized.  Mark Needleman mentioned that the University of
     California under the auspices of the Coalition for Networked
     Information will move forward with plans to get organizations that
     have already done work in the area of networked fax to convert
     their projects to the standard file format and to get those
     projects to interoperate with each other.  This will serve both to
     test out the proposed RFC and will also provide the requisite
     number of implementations that are required before a document can
     become a full RFC. Other participants in the meeting also indicated
     they would begin working on building implementations.

   o Some discussion was held on the issue of testing and building
     conformance suites.  It was agreed that some test files would be

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     made available that could be used to test an implementation.  Mark
     Needleman and Carl Malamud agreed to discuss among themselves where
     to locate these files.  The idea being that they would either
     reside on stubbs.ucop.edu or on a host that Carl has access to.


Attendees

Jeffrey Buffum           buffum@vos.stratus.com
Ned Freed                ned@innosoft.com
Russ Hobby               rdhobby@ucdavis.edu
Ole Jacobsen             ole@csli.stanford.edu
Scott Kaplan
Neil Katin               katin@eng.sun.com
Jim Knowles              jknowles@trident.arc.nasa.gov
Peter Liebscher          plieb@sura.net
Carl Malamud             carl@malamud.com
Mark Needleman           mhn@stubbs.ucop.edu
Daniel Newman            dan@innosoft.com
Jon Postel               postel@isi.edu
Daisy Shen               daisy@watson.ibm.com
Andrew Veitch            aveitch@bbn.com
William Yundt            gd.why@forsythe.stanford.edu



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