Applications Area Director(s): o Russ Hobby: rdhobby@ucdavis.edu Area Summary reported by Russ Hobby/UCDavis Area Overview The Applications Area of the IETF is moving to bring multimedia capabilities to the Internet. One Working Group in particular, The Internet Message Format Extensions Working Group (822ext), has made great strides in this direction. This Working Group is finishing the specifications to allow email to have multiple parts to the message where each part may be text, image, audio, video or other types of information to be presented to the end user. The Network News Transport Protocol Working Group (nntp) is working closely with the new message format to bring these capabilities to the network news world. The Teleconferencing BOF explored the idea of desktop video conferencing. The general goal of the area is to define the protocols to create an interoperable multimedia distributed computing environment for the Internet. Working Groups Summary o Internet Message Format Extensions (822ext) The Working Group is finishing the document on multi-part mail messages that will replace RFC 822, and plans to submit the document as a Proposed Standard in early January. This will complete the work of the group. o Internet Mail Extensions (smtpext) The Working Group has a new Chair, John Klensin (MIT). The group had to decide if progress could be made towards a method to allow eight bit characters in SMTP. The group decided to define a means for negotiating the transport of eight bit characters. It was thought that the method could also be useful for negotiation of other items, such as allowed message size. o Network News Transport Protocol (nntp) This Working Group did not meet in Santa Fe, but has been making good progress on the mail list and has a document about ready to be issued as an Internet Draft. o Automated Internet Mailing List Services (list) Unfortunately the Chair of this Working Group, David Lippke, had to resign due to a reassignment of work duties. The group will be on hold until a new Chair is found. o Network FAX (netfax) The Working Group finished work on the image format to be used for transporting FAX on the Internet. The Document will be available as an Internet Draft soon. o Network Database (netdata) The Working Group continued work on the definition of SQL transactions over TCP/IP networks. The group is small and there 1 needs to be involvement from other SQL implementors. o TELNET (telnet) The Working Group made further progress on authentication and encryption for TELNET sessions. It was decided that authentication and encryption need to be closely tied together in operation. o Teleconferencing BOF (teleconf) At this BOF several individuals presented work being done on teleconferencing over the Internet. After the presentations there was discussion on how the problem can be broken in work that can be done by various working groups. One Working Group was created to define methods for realtime transport of audio and video. 2