Many of you are probably already aware of the Voice Profile for
Internet Mail (VPIM) specification that was issued as Experimental
RFC 1911 earlier this year. The Electronic Messaging Association (EMA),
with input from both the voice messaging and email industries, has
recently completed a final version of VPIM (dubbed version 2) that is
available as an Internet Draft <draft-ema-vpim-03.txt> and is attached
to this message. We have requested that the IETF Applications Area
approve this specification as a Proposed Standard.
While I support this document and the profile it describes, there are at least
four procedural issues that I believe need to be resolved:
(1) The document calls for the use of application/directory objects. As far
as I know application/directory hasn't yet been approved as a
proposed standard, making this usage problematic.
I fully expect application/directory to move onto the standards track
in due course, so this problem will disappear on its own in the future.
The issue then becomes one of timing -- is the reference to vCard
formats worth holding up this document? I suspect that it is, but it is
something to be considered.
(2) The document calls for the use of the CHUNKING and BINARYMIME
SMTP extensions. These are both experimental protocols, and I know of
nothing in the works to move them onto the standards track. As such,
this usage is also problematic and is likely to remain so for some time.
(3) This document doesn't just profile existing services, it defines some
new ones, e.g. the content-duration header field. I would much rather
see the definition of any new services in a document separate from the
service profile.
(4) I question the appropriateness of this document becoming a proposed
standard. Modulo the definition of new services (which I think belong in
a separate document anyway) it isn't a protocol definition, it is a
profiling of several extant procotols defined elsewhere. The result
feels a lot more like either a BCP or AS to me.
Ned