I share some of Keith's concerns; this seems a somewhat badly written
charter (and seems to omit changes that the group agreed on).
At 09:18 6/15/2001 -0400, The IESG wrote:
>Open Pluggable Edge Services (opes)
>-----------------------------------
>
>Current Status: Proposed Working Group
>
>Description of Working Group:
>
>The Open Plugable Edge Service (OPES) WG primary task is to define a
>protocol to be used to extend participating transit intermediaries to
>incorporate services executed on application data transported by HTTP.
The lack of scope is worrying here, and Keith's point about the meaning of
"intermediary" is particularly relevant.
Further, I was under the impression that the group was also considering RTP
in addition to HTTP? I believe there was a decision to specifically
exclude SMTP, but I'm not sure I follow the logic here. There are
different requirements in terms of how the protocols are used (mostly the
real-time requirements I suspect) but it seems that the following charter
text states some good reasons to consider SMTP:
"The advantage of standardizing a protocol for this is that services can
be re-used across vendor products without modifying the transit
intermediaries or services."
(That said, one can argue the case that with SMTP one could simply relay
the message to the processing box using SMTP anyway.)
>The protocol provides a framework for integrating arbitrary services
>into arbitrary intermediaries.
The minutes of the BoF in Minneapolis state that there was agreement to
remove the word "arbitrary" in the first paragraph.
