applicability statement addition to draft-ietf-fax-esmtp-conneg-10.txt

[Larry Masinter <LMM@xxxxxxx>]

Personally, I think adding some applicability disclaimers
to draft-ietf-fax-esmtp-conneg-10.txt would be welcome.

The document describes some very general mechanisms for
content adaptation, but I don't believe the working group,
as a whole, has evaluated those mechanisms except in the
Internet Fax scenario.

There continues to be significant R&D in other parts of
the community on the topic of content adaptation -- on the
appropriate vocabulary for expressing content capabilities,
the range of allowable values, the possibility of splitting
characteristics, preferences and capabilities as separate
negotiation parameters.

Just today, for example, I read a Call for Participation on a W3C
Workshop on Metadata for Content Adaptation
http://www.w3.org/2004/06/DI-MCA-WS/.

It isn't clear to me whether anyone in that community has
seriously reviewed this document for applicability in
the mobile domain; certainly, they are clearly looking at
different vocabularies and negotiation mechanisms.

While the document uses wording that implies broad
applicability, it seems pretty clear that it was only
evaluated in the Internet Fax context.

For example, the example in section 8.2 for
CONNEG seem to assume that the sender and receiver
agree on the applicable MIME types for the message,
since the CONNEG parameters in the example contain
no media types available for negotiation at all.

(In fact, all of the examples seem to assume
image/tiff OR image/tiff-fx without selecting
which might be appropriate.)

Larry
-- 
http://larry.masinter.net