W3C XML Protocol Working Group teleconference minutes: 7 March 2001

Roll call

PRESENT 47/36
Active Data Exchange	Richard Martin	principal
Akamai Technologies	Mark Nottingham	principal
Allaire	Glen Daniels	principal
AT&T	Mark Jones	principal
AT&T	Michah Lerner	alternate
Canon	Jean-Jacques Moreau	principal
Cisco	Krishna Sankar	principal
Commerce One	David Burdett	principal
Compaq	Kevin Perkins	alternate
Compaq	Yin-Leng Husband	principal
DaimlerChrysler R. & Tech	Mario Jeckle	principal
DataChannel	Brian Eisenberg	principal
DevelopMentor	Martin Gudgin	principal
Engenia Software	Jeffrey Kay	principal
Fujitsu Software Corporation	Kazunori Iwasa	principal
Hewlett Packard	Stuart Williams	alternate
Hewlett Packard	David Ezell	principal
IBM	David Fallside	chair
IBM	John Ibbotson	principal
IDOOX	Miroslav Simek	alternate
Informix Software	Charles Campbell	principal
Interwoven	Mark Hale	principal
IONA Technologies	Oisin Hurley	principal
Jamcracker	David Orchard	principal
Library of Congress	Ray Denenberg	principal
Lotus Development	Noah Mendelsohn	principal
Matsushita Electric	Ryuji Inoue	principal
Microsoft Corporation	Henrik Nielsen	principal
Microsoft Corporation	Paul Cotton	alternate
Mitre	Paul Denning	alternate
Mitre	Marwan Sabbouh	principal
Netscape	Ray Whitmer	alternate
Netscape	Vidur Apparao	principal
Novell	Scott Isaacson	principal
Oracle	David Clay	principal
Philips Research	Yasser alSafadi	principal
Philips Research	Amr Yassin	alternate
Rogue Wave	Murali Janakiraman	principal
Rogue Wave	Patrick Thompson	alternate
SAP AG	Gerd Hoelzing	alternate
SAP AG	Volker Wiechers	principal
Software AG	Michael Champion	principal
Sun Microsystems	Marc Hadley	principal
Tibco	Frank DeRose	principal
W3C	Hugo Haas	alt team contact
W3C	Yves Lafon	team contact
WebMethods	Randy Waldrop	principal

AUTOMATICALLY EXCUSED
Active Data Exchange	Eric Fedok	alternate
Allaire	Simeon Simeonov	alternate
Canon	Herve Ruellan	alternate
Commerce One	Murray Maloney	alternate
DaimlerChrysler R. & Tech	Andreas Riegg	alternate
DevelopMentor	Don Box	alternate
Engenia Software	Eric Jenkins	alternate
Fujitsu Software Corporation	Masahiko Narita	alternate
IBM	Fransisco Cubera	alternate
Informix Software	Soumitro Tagore	alternate
Interwoven	Ron Daniel	alternate
IONA Technologies	Eric Newcomer	alternate
Library of Congress	Rich Greenfield	alternate
Oracle	Jim Trezzo	alternate
Software AG	Dietmar Gaertner	alternate
Sun Microsystems	Mark Baker	alternate

REGRETS
Bowstreet	Alex Ceponkus (carpT)	alternate
Calico Commerce	Rekha Nagarajan	principal
Data Research Associates	Mark Needleman	principal
Epicentric	Bjoern Heckel	principal
Ericsson Research Canada	Nilo Mitra	principal
Group 8760	Dick Brooks	ebXML contact
IDOOX	Jacek Kopecky	principal
Intel	Randy Hall	principal
OMG	Henry Lowe	principal
Unisys	Lynne Thompson	principal
Unisys	Nick Smilonich	alternate

ABSENT WITHOUT EXPLANATION
Bowstreet	James Tauber	principal
Epicentric	Dean Moses	alternate
Progress Software	Peter Lecuyer	alternate
Tradia	George Scott	principal
Tradia	Erin Hoffman	alternate
Vitria Technology Inc.	Richard Koo	alternate
Vitria Technology Inc.	Waqar Sadiq	principal
Xerox	Tom Breuel	primary
XMLSolutions	Kevin Mitchell	principal
XMLSolutions	John Evdemon	alternate

3. Approval of minutes from Feb 21 teleconference:

Usual tweaks.

Hugo should ask I18N whether they have objections to their item being made
public.

No other suggestions for removal.

Hugo will take care of the minutes.

Chair: Minutes from F2F were posted yesterday; they will be on the next
telecon agenda for approval.  Please read them!

4. Review of action items

Quick poll to determine whether we need to do more extensive polling
about adopting a new acronym: Is XMLP acceptable to group?
4-5 objections, Several approvals ...

Question: Why did we drop XP?  Microsoft or trademark issue?
Answer: General appearance issue, a number of reasons,

Chair will generate call for discussion, vote.  Send suggestions to Chair
for polling procedures.

Henrik: Promote DS 11 with edits.  Done.

Mark Jones: DS 19 rewrite .  Done at F2F and given to Henrik.  Mark will
check online version to ensure that it is changed.

Jeff Kay: New wording for DS 17. Posted to list.

Ray Whitmer: Issue 43, Get clarification.  Sent one around, Vidur suggested
we drop issue, Ray concurs.  No objections.  Issue closed.

David Fallside: Draft response to issue 46. Done. Several people read it,
WG expressed general approval. One small issue vis a vis URI, URL, URN.
Needs to be brought up as a separate issue.

Mark Nottingham: Draft is OK as general response, but what about RPC people
in IETF?  What is the specific relationship with them? Chair: we haven't
run into this situation yet; the issue as broght up was vis a vis SOAP, we
have answered that requirement.  We will  continue to maintain contact with
IETF, but if SOAP's RPC spec meets our requirements, we're done.  If an
issue arises, we will pay attention.

Chair proposes to close the issue, and will send mail to the public list,
Henrik will update the issues list. WG consensus agreement.

5. Results of BOF in Boston with I18N Members

Paul Denning: I18N wanted clarification regarding our statement that
receivers reject unnormalized control information. We propose "Recipients
should assume that text data is normalized, and must not normalized" The
I18N should replace the first MUST with SHOULD.  See Paul's email message
linked off the agenda.

Chair: What is the effect?  We said that we should reject any unnormalized
data that  is  received; I18N thinks we must assume that it is normalized,
so if you don't  assume that it is normalized, you should take great care.
Thus, we can reject  unnormalized data if we think we should; they agreed
to the premise that the payload is the  applications responsibility, not
the protocol's.

Mark Hale: We want to assure I18N that we can carry both normalized and
un-normalized payloads.   The BOF agreed to come up with useage scenarios,
but they are not our  responsibility.

Chair: Is the I18N prepared to do this?

Mark: volunteered to come up with these  scenarios.

Chair: Does this make sense? No objection

Yasser: BOF discussions mentioned use of terms sender and receiver; they
will review their use of various synonyms for these terms, and agreed that
they need better  terminology. Also, they brought up term "originator" ...
They
will clarify the boundary of  "sender" or "originator" and "receiver" or
"recipient".

Chair:  Need audit trail of this discussion.

Dave Clay: I have notes, will offer them, and contact I18N.

ACTION ITEM: David Clay takes action item to contact I18N to get their
response to our response to these issues.

Chair: Have not yet reached closure on whether we recommend this change to
change "MUST" to "SHOULD". Any discussion?

Yin-Leng: Can we explain why we proposed the change in our response?

Chair: David or Paul, please do so ... Dave, Paul: they will coordinate.
Action item on Paul Denning and David Clay to draft such language and bring
it back to the group.

6. State of the Glossary

Chair: We decided at F2F to publish requirements doc with changes that have
accrued since December and will use this opportunity to do a proper
"heartbeat" update.  We  hoped to have a glossary before then, and need to
have this by "heartbeat" deadline  of March 19. Need to discuss revised
glossary at next telecon, need revisions in time to discuss them. Stuart
and Martin, where are we?

Martin: Had call today to reconcile terms in abstract model and glossary,
made good progress but did not finish.  (2/3 done) "Block", "Handler", and
"Module" were problematic, will take to email.  Can publish something early
next week.

Chair: Do you have new text written for agreed upon items?

Stuart: Yes, this was written up as we went along.

Chair: Hopes for resolution of the three terms, and others that they
skipped. The sense of the participants in the telecon is that the
disagreements are not major, and agree to put this in  the next version of
Requirements document.

Chair: Any questions about glossary?

Question: Who receives recommendations for submissions to glossary?

Chair: Send them to the list, or Martin. Martin will send draft to dist-app
in time for discussion over weekend, will publish proposal on Monday that
we can discuss on Wednesday.

7. TODO list from Abstract model group

>From F2F meeting ... group should come up with proposed TODO list.

Stuart: Constructed a draft list which has been circulated, got three
responses. List rearranged and reposted yesterday.  Trying to reach state
where that list is closed. AMG teleconference scheduled for Friday, will
make plans and assignments based on the list at that point.

List itself --

1 - Reconcile glossary and AMG terms and definitions.
2 - Do more work on service model abstractions, Section 3, 1 way and 2-way
operations.
3 - XML Protocol modules; define message processing model, and message
handling, fault handling.
4 - Template for XML protocol specification; guidance to those writing a
module as to what they should put into a module specificaiton.  Good model
is XML digital signatures for SOAP
5 - Template for XML protocol binding specifications
6 - Model for arbitrary attachments, convergence with ebXML.
7 - Sanity checking AMG against SOAP 1.1,
8 - Sanity check against SOAP with attachment
9 - Sanity check against our requirements document and use cases.

Chair: 4 and 5 are "good things" we are charged with doing ... but these
are general working group things, not AMG issues.  Put them on overall TODO
list. 7 and 8 are low  priority, on this list, but should be used to scope
AM
effort from the start.  We should  not spend time  developing model that is
larger than we need, and this is bounded by SOAP 1.1  and SOAP with
Attachments.

Chair: We are charged with starting from SOAP 1.1, so the AM must be able
to describe these specs; actual mapping of  our requirements onto SOAP is
another task.  By doing that mapping, we bound  the functionality that is
expressible in the AM.  AMG should give this more urgent consideration to
avoid feature creep.  Hope to publish AM document at the end of this month.
AMG agrees to this  objective.

Chair: Spin out 4 and 5 to larger group ... develop new subgroup to
work on these. Mark Hadley and Henrik will take this on and try to
have a draft by the end of the month. Decide later if this is part of
the AM document or larger spec.

Number 4 Dave Clay volunteers to work on it.  Glenn also volunteers.

Chair: Stuart, are you covered for items 2 and 3?

Stuart: Item 3 is large, but item 2 is close to being done. Fault handling
needs further discussion. There are  enough bodies on the AMG, need more
coordination.  AMG commits to 2 and 3 being done by end of month.

Chair: 6,  Mark Jones signed up, also there is an ebXML convergence
subgroup. Will extract commitments at teleconference on Friday.  Stuart
will sweep up whatever is left.

8. Issue reports postponed

9. Continue discussion from F2F on when do we publish first draft

Chair: revised timeline put forth at F2F mapping out timeline, everything
moved out two months.  January WD milestone for specification moved to end
of March.  There is a list of issues created by mapping requirements
against 1.1.  Can we just publish draft spec with these issues?  No, we
need to do more substantive work on specification.  One way of measuring
this is resolution of the issues put up against the requirements.  Chair
will generate prioritized list of these issues (critical, less critical).
WG could consider trying to resolve the critical issues, and then
publishing the draft spec that reflects this resolution.  Chair will get
issues out by end of the week.  Any comments or concerns?

Mark Jones:  Since we turned DS's into S's, thought we would do publication
of  requirements doc.

Chair: Yes, we will.

Comment: A conversation at F2F considered publishing issues list as WD.

Chair: Comment back from WG at F2F indicated that this was not sufficient.
Now we need agreement on the specific list of critical issues from the
group. Several enthusiastic agreements.

Paul Cotton: "end of March" used as both time to complete AM and to publish
WD. This doesn't give WG much time to consider this .. probably need 2
telecons to discuss the draft documents.  What timeframe does chair have in
mind?

Chair: Will take to email.