The Real-Time Communication in WEB-browsers (rtcweb) WG in the Applications and Real-Time Area has concluded. The IESG contact persons are Adam Roach, Barry Leiba, and Alexey Melnikov.
The mailing list will remain open. -- For those of you who like to flip to the end of a book: with the entry of the final dependencies of its core work into the RFC Editor queue, the working group is closing. The mailing list will remain open for discussion, and any trailing documents will be processed by Adam as AD sponsored or headed to DISPATCH. For those of you who wish to take a journey, open your books to IETF 80, in Prague <https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/80/rtcweb.html>;; it's late March and Spring is in the air. A large and plucky band of folks are trying to work out if it is possible to have real time communications in a browser without any plugins. The resulting work will require protocol changes, new APIs, and a new level of cooperation between the IETF and the W3C. The outlook is optimistic; the IESG agrees to a mailing list on April 4, 2011 and to make the effort a working group on May 3rd. Our first meeting as a working group was IETF 81 <https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/81/rtcweb.html>: The rooms were large, the energy palpable, and the optimism at a quick and decisive effort had resulted in a charter with milestones like this: Goals and Milestones: Aug 2011 Architecture, Security, Privacy and Threat Model sent to W3C Aug 2011 Use cases, Scenarios, and Requirements document (I-D) sent to W3C Sep 2011 Architecture and Security, Privacy, and Threat Model document(s) to IESG as Informational Sep 2011 Use cases, Scenarios, and Requirements for RTCWeb document sent to IESG as Informational Dec 2011 RTCWeb protocol profiles and Media format specification(s) to IESG as PS Dec 2011 Information elements and events APIs Input to W3C Apr 2012 API to Protocol mapping document submitted to the IESG as Informational (if needed) Ladies and gentleman, we are a bit late. During the time this working group was active, we went through multiple ADs: Gonzalo was succeeded by Alissa and then by Adam. The Area we were in, RAI, was merged with APPS to create ART. Magnus, one of the original WG chairs, had a baby and was succeeded by Sean, who then had a baby (Actually, make that two babies in both cases). Cullen was eventually poached by his management to serve as CTO of Webex. The group was also prolific. My personal archive for the mailing list shows just over 9000 messages, (though this is slightly inflated by my putting chair messages in there as well.) The cluster of documents that is the output of the work in RTCWEB and in the working groups on whom we had dependencies has become legendary: cluster 238 gave rise to both some extraordinary dwell times (the data protocol and channel drafts are at 1679 days, more than four and half years) and some RFC editor innovations (the creation of a cluster mailing list, so that AUTH48 changes are coordinated across groups). While the working group tussled over interoperability with non-browser systems and then on the implications of that decision for codecs, we lost some time. We appear, however, to have made up for it: WebRTC is available in well over a billion applications or endpoints. By the simple metrics of rough consensus and running code, it is a runaway success. On behalf of all the chairs and area directors who were part of the journey, for your contributions to that success, whether as document author, minute taker, jabber scribe, interim host, comment maker or poser of questions, many thanks, Ted Hardie _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce mailing list IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
