CURRENT MEETING REPORT Minutes of the MIME Content--Type for SGML Documents Working Group (mimesgml) Reported by Glenn Vanderburg, University of Texas at Dallas Overview of Status o The types, multipart/related, and access--cid drafts have all been sent to the RFC editors and are awaiting publication as experimental RFCs. o Don Stinchfield has informally circulated a new draft of the exchange proposal. o Two different proposals are currently being advanced; one is the "encapsulation" proposal (draft--ietf--mimesgml--encap--02.txt), by Ed Levinson, and the other is the "exchange" proposal (draft-- ietf--mimesgml--exch--00.txt), by Don Stinchfield. The exchange proposal was described initially as being well--suited for the Web, but also useful for e--mail. The encapsulation proposal was explicitly designed for e--mail. Both proposals are intended by their proponents for the standards track, but no working group consensus currently exists. John Klensin observed that the IESG would not accept two different, non--interoperable specs as proposed standards unless there was both a clear explanation of different circumstances in which to use the different mechanisms, and working group consensus behind the explanation. Failing consensus on either a single proposal or such an explanation of use, the only alternative would be to advance both proposals as experimental RFCs. o There was some discussion of the impact of having working code for one or the other of the proposals. Bill Smith indicated that EBT plans to implement the exchange proposal in an http--based system, and that James Clark may be doing an independent implementation. Mark Joseph of Wollongong said that his company has an implementation of the encapsulation proposal in a mail environment. John Klensin pointed out two process issues: considering that the group charter specifies e--mail----an http-- based implementation doesn't count. And in the case of specifications which involve a client/server relationship, two independent, interoperable implementations are required. o The point was raised that multipart/related is an important development in its own right, and should not be held to experimental because of disagreement on some dependent proposals. There was general agreement, and John Klensin pointed out that a big reason for the experimental status of multipart/related is its overlap with work done by other working groups, such as the Content--Disposition header. He also pointed out that multipart, especially with regard to the handling of unrecognized subtypes, is perceived to be one of the more fragile parts of MIME, so any new multipart subtype which was proposed as a standard would be given intense scrutiny by MIME experts. In such a case it would seem that operational experience as an experimental specification would be useful. Discussion of the Working Group Scope o There was a proposal to extend the charter to cover Web--based interchange, in addition to e--mail. There was general consensus that Web interchange is also desired, but that it should not be incorporated into this working group's charter at this time. John Klensin advanced several arguments that addressing the Web issue at this point would cause process problems and introduce further delay. John also requested a volunteer to co--chair the Working Group, preferably someone not associated with either proposal. No one volunteered. Discussion of Two Competing Proposals o There was a request for a description of the relative advantages of each proposal. A simple description turned out to be difficult. Discussion centered on requirements for various parts of the system to parse the SGML data, and requirements for rewriting parts of the document for interchange (and the effect of such rewriting on message integrity checks). o This discussion ended with very little agreement, except on the point that implementation of the encapsulation proposal may prove difficult with some MIME systems which do not convey arbitrary MIME entity headers to viewers or helper applications. Milestones o Two milestones were agreed upon: o Don Stinchfield will formally circulate a new draft of the exchange proposal by the end of the year. o By the time of the next meeting in March, the Working Group should reach an agreement on how to advance one or both of the proposals.