Network working group Graham Klyne (editor) Internet draft 5GM/Content Technologies Category: Work-in-progress Richard Shockey Shockey Consulting LLC 18 October 1999 Expires: April 2000 Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer Status of this memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC 2026. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet- Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society 1999. All Rights Reserved. Abstract This document sets out some goals beyond those in "Terminology and Goals for Internet Fax" [4] for a service to perform fax and high quality document transmission across the Internet. Internet fax [1,2] defines a way to send fax data over the Internet using e-mail. But there is a clear desire, particularly on the part of non-technical users, for a service that more closely emulates the operational characteristics of traditional fax [3], and also provides capabilities commonly available for documents generated and processed by computer. Klyne & Shockey Work-in-progress [Page 1] Internet Draft Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer 18 October 1999 Table of contents 1. Introduction ............................................2 1.1 Organization of this document 3 1.2 Document conventions 3 1.3 Discussion of this document 4 2. Terminology .............................................4 3. Operational modes .......................................4 4. Goals for High Quality Document Distribution ............5 4.1 Timely delivery 6 4.2 Proof of delivery/receipt 6 4.3 Date and time information 7 4.4 Quality of output 8 4.5 Legal identity exchange 8 4.6 Legal issues 8 4.7 Cover page 9 4.8 Security 9 4.9 Support for third party operation 10 4.10 Interworking with other services 10 5. Internationalization considerations .....................11 6. Security considerations .................................11 7. Full copyright statement ................................12 8. Acknowledgements ........................................12 9. References ..............................................12 10. Authors' addresses .....................................14 Appendix A: Revision history ...............................15 1. Introduction The transmission and reception of final form documents (i.e. presented in a form that describes their final rendering) is an essential global communications service. Several protocols and services have been developed over the years to facilitate document transmission, including the GSTN Fax service, ITU-T T.30 [3]. Within the IETF several protocols have been developed that can be used for document transmission, including Internet fax [1,2] (using e-mail protocols) and the Internet Print Protocol [5] (using elements from HTTP). But there is a clear desire, particularly on the part of non-technical users, for a service that more closely emulates the operational characteristics of traditional fax [3], and also provides capabilities commonly available for documents generated and processed by computer. Klyne & Shockey Work-in-progress [Page 2] Internet Draft Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer 18 October 1999 This document sets out some goals for such a service, and introduces related terminology where needed. "Terminology and Goals for Internet Fax" [4] is used as a baseline for these goals; this memo further expands on some issues that characterize the current practice of facsimile transmission. These features are intended to facilitate the use of quality document transfer in compliance with the legal as well as general custom and practice surrounding document transmission by facsimile. 1.1 Organization of this document This document uses "Terminology and Goals for Internet Fax" [4] as a baseline, and describes goals for quality document transfer in terms of additions and differences from that document. Section 2 introduces new terminology that is generaly useful in discussion of quality document transfer. Section 3 discusses operational modes for quality document transfer. Section 4 describes the goals for quality document transfer. It starts with a brief listing of all the goals, then proceeds to explain in more detail those that are not described elsewhere. 1.2 Document conventions This memo uses the annotations described in "Terminology and Goals for Internet Fax" [4] to indicate levels of desirability for a quality document transfer protocol: {1} there is general agreement that this is a critical characteristic of any definition of a quality document transfer protocol. {2} most believe that this is an important characteristic of a quality document transfer protocol. {3} there is general belief that this is a useful feature of a quality document transfer protocol, but that other factors might override; a definition that does not provide this element is acceptable. NOTE: Comments like this provide additional nonessential information about the rationale behind this document, and may help those who wish to understand the ideas in greater depth. Klyne & Shockey Work-in-progress [Page 3] Internet Draft Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer 18 October 1999 1.3 Discussion of this document Please send comments regarding this document to: ifx@pwg.org To subscribe to this list, send a message with the body 'subscribe ifx' to 'Majordomo@pwg.org'. To see what has gone on before you subscribed, please see the mailing list archive at: http://www.pwg.org/hypermail/ifx 2. Terminology [[[TBD]]] Watermarking commonly refers to the addition of marks to each page of a facsimile transmission. These marks are typically placed at the top of each page by the sender's terminal device or software application, and may contain time/date, sender identification and page number. The recipient output device does not modify the document once it is received. 3. Operational modes RFC 2542 [4], section 2.5, discusses operational modes for Internet fax. (The intent of "session" mode, described there, is to provide a timely delivery without being constrained by the kind of rigid protocol timing constraints that are normal when using a circuit based protocol like T.30.) For the purposes of this memo, the following operational mode definitions are used: o "Store and forward", per RFC 2542. o "Timely delivery" means that a document is delivered, and any confirmation is returned, reliably and within a predictable period of time that is short enough to be useful for the purposes of routine communications. Klyne & Shockey Work-in-progress [Page 4] Internet Draft Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer 18 October 1999 o "Prompt delivery" means that a document is delivered, and any confirmation is returned, in little longer that it takes to actually transmit the document data. That is, for a moderately sized document the sender might be expected to wait for completion of the transfer. o "Real time" means that delivery is completed within some defined maximum time delay, or the process of delivery is deemed to have failed. Traditional Group 3 facsimile is a real time service in this sense. True real time behaviour can be difficult to achieve reliably in the global Internet. RFC 2542 defines "Real-time Internet Fax" to mean a service that allows two standard Group 3 fax terminals using T.30 protocols to communicate via the Internet. This specifically requires that the various T.30 signals and responses are completed within quite short periods of time. 4. Goals for High Quality Document Distribution [[[It's not clear to me whether we want to separate specification requirements from "operational goals" and "functional goals", as in RFC2542. I think we should see what material we generate for this.]]] Many of the underlying goals for QUALDOCS are described in RFC 2542, "Terminology and Goals for Internet Fax" [4]. This section recalls and expands upon those goals. These are: o {1} timely delivery (section 4.1 below, and RFC 2542 section 4.4) o {1} proof of delivery/receipt (section 4.2 below, and RFC 2542 section 4.3) o {1} date and time information (Section 4.3 below, and RFC 2542 section 4.10) o {1} data format support (RFC 2542 section 5.1) o {1} quality of output (Section 4.4 below) o {1} capabilities exchange (RFC 2542 sections 4.5 and 5,5) o {1} addressing support (RFC 2542, section 5.3) o {2} legal identity exchange (Section 4.5 below) Klyne & Shockey Work-in-progress [Page 5] Internet Draft Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer 18 October 1999 o {2} legal issues (Section 4.6 below, and RFC 2542 section 4.10) o {2} cover pages (Section 4.7 below) o {1} security (Section 4.8 below, and RFC 2542 section 4.7) o {3} support for third party operation (Section 4.9 below) o {2} interworking with other services (Section 4.10 below, and RFC 2542 section 4.2) o {2} QUALDOCS should be reasonable easy to implement (RFC 2542, section 4.6) o {1} A QUALDOCS protocol must operate reliably in the global Internet. (See also RFC 2542, section 4.8.) o {3} use of existing infrastructure. If QUALDOCS requires additions to the operational environment (services, firewall support, gateways, quality of service, protocol extensions), then it is preferable if those additions are useful for other applications. (See also RFC 2542, section 5.2) o {3} features shared with other messaging applications (voice mail, short message service, paging, etc.) are desirable, so as not to require different operational changes for other applications. (See also RFC 2542, sections 2.4.3, 2.4.4) o {3} it is desirable that a quality document transfer protocol support and facilitate universal messaging systems (RFC 2542, section 2.4.5 [4]) 4.1 Timely delivery (See RFC 2542, section 4.4. The QUALDOCS goal stated here for timely delivery is stonger.) QUALDOCS must provide for delivery of a document immediately, or very soon after it is transmitted. "Very soon" means within a period of time that a human user might reasonably wait for delivery to be completed (e.g. less than a minute). 4.2 Proof of delivery/receipt (See RFC 2542, section 4.3. The goals for QUALDOCS are stronger in this area.) Detailed progress reports and transaction logs have become standard end user requirements for a facsimile service in order to document the receipt and confirmation of facsimile delivery. Klyne & Shockey Work-in-progress [Page 6] Internet Draft Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer 18 October 1999 Any report from the facsimile service: o Must note status (SUCCESS, FAILURE, CAUSE OF FAILURE) o Must note date and time of all attempts (log files recorded at each end by client and server locally) o May note the duration of the transaction o May note the number of document pages transferred o Should mutually exchange and document the identity of sender and recipient. Traditional facsimile uses real-time monitoring and signalling to indicate to the sender when a document transmission has completed, or report on any errors encountered. Extended Internet fax service proposals [2] recommend the use of DSN and MDN [19,20,15] for confirmation of delivery and receipt. NOTE: a considerable body of market survey research indicates that confirmation of delivery or receipt is the feature that people most like about traditional facsimile. Some feel that the non-universal deployment of DSN, and the possibility of refusing an MDN request, is holding back market acceptance for some Internet fax services; they therefore believe that something different needs to be devised that more closely approximates the "look and feel" of existing fax and has the ability to be quickly extended in the future. 4.3 Date and time information (See RFC 2542, section 4.10. This section expands on the indicated legal requirement for date and time of transmission to be indicated.) Closely associated with the need for transaction receipt and notification is the legal requirement (see "Legal issues") that at least the first page of a facsimile contain the time and date of transmission and that information be included in any facsimile service record. Facsimile terminal devices all have internal clock devices for recording the time/date of transactions. Actual time information is not exchanged "on the wire". Each device notes when it sends and receives documents and logs those transactions appropriately. Klyne & Shockey Work-in-progress [Page 7] Internet Draft Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer 18 October 1999 All Internet fax transactions note time/date information in the e-mail header information. QUALDOCS systems must implement clocks in their systems, or consider the use one of the time protocols RFC 867, RFC 868, RFC 1305 or RFC 2030 [22,23,24,25], to obtain time/date information for transaction logging. Examples of transaction information that may be useful to record include: - time of transmission by sender - time of reception by receiver - time that rendering (e.g. printing) is completed 4.4 Quality of output It is a fundamental goal of QUALDOCS that not only is the information content of a document transferred, but also that high presentation quality can be achieved (subject the the receiver's capabilities). Received documents should be capable of presentation that allows them to be used directly in the same ways that a locally prepared document might be used. (Contrast with traditional facsimile, which typicaly does not provide an image one would choose to use directly in a company report.) 4.5 Legal identity exchange (See RFC 2542, section 4.10. This section expands on the indicated legal requirement for the identity of the sender to be indicated.) The identity of senders and recipients in traditional facsimile are achieved through the legal requirements for operating a fax terminal and the exchange of T.30 CSID frames between terminal devices. Internet fax uses e-mail header information to identify the sender to the recipient. The recipient has no requirement to exchange identification data. QUALDOCS should define a mechanism for achieving a full exchange of identity between the sender and receiver. 4.6 Legal issues RFC 2542 section 4.10 quotes part of the US RCC regulations, which indicate a legal requirement for date, time, identity and telephone number to appear on any fax message. Klyne & Shockey Work-in-progress [Page 8] Internet Draft Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer 18 October 1999 Of particular note is that there is no requirement that the marks for identifying information be placed on every page. The legal requirement is only for the first page, though it has become custom and practice among all FAX device manufacturers to include the "watermark" on each page transmitted. It is believed that some other nations have legal requirements for FAX similar to those in the United States. 4.7 Cover page Closely associated with the legal issues are the formats and requirements for cover pages. QUALDOCS should provide a mechanism to include cover page information that conforms to the legal or general custom and practice applied to facsimile services, when such information is not already part of the document being sent. To satisfy legal requirements for Facsimile transmission cover pages: o Must contain identification of Sender: o Should contain identification of Recipient: o Must contain time/Date of Transmission: o May contain number of pages in Transmission: o May contain an area for short comments: Workstation software, when operating in a facsimile service mode, should offer cover page generation options and may offer other features, as deemed appropriate. If possible, cover page information should be distinguishable from message payload data (e.g. see the cover page proposal for Internet fax [21]). 4.8 Security (See RFC 2542, section 4.7, which offers some specific requirements for Internet fax security. The following text addresses some broader issues which should be considered by a QUALDOCS protocol.) Klyne & Shockey Work-in-progress [Page 9] Internet Draft Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer 18 October 1999 Security encompasses a number of inter-related issues. o Privacy: not disclosing private information about a user's affairs, either through disclosure of confidential message content, or my disclosure of a user's actions and preferences in sending or receiving a document. o Authenticity: not providing information that would mislead a user into incorrectly believing a message has been received from or by some identified person. o Integrity: ensuring that messages received are a faithfull rebdition of what was sent. o Non-repudiation: making available a confirmation of document receipt that provides some basis for demonstrating that the message was properly delivered to its intended recipient. o Availability: robust operation in the face of attempts to prevent the normal transfer of documents. On the surface, it would seem that no one would want to make their printer available on the Internet. It should be noted, however, that we have globally accessible printers available now, called fax machines. If the issues mentioned above are adequately addressed and documented, this external availability can be extended to a wider range of devices. 4.9 Support for third party operation In some environments, it may be desirable to hand off delivery of a document to some third party and report back (a) the fact that the hand-off has occurred, and (b) subsequent indication from the third party that delivery has indeed been effected. An example of this kind of scnario would be a service that received documents electronically, printed them, then obtains a signature when delivering the physical document. 4.10 Interworking with other services (See RFC 2542, section 4.2 and section 2. The QUALDOCS goals are less specific with regard to interoperability with particular Internet services.) Klyne & Shockey Work-in-progress [Page 10] Internet Draft Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer 18 October 1999 If a QUALDOCS system operating in a facsimile service mode is unable to send a TIFF-FX or appropriate GSTN fax file format but wishes to gateway to another facsimile service then the gateway system must be able to convert the available document data to the format required by the facsimile service. Choice of baseline formats and capabilities should take account of other services with which QUALDOCS systems may be required to interwork. 5. Internationalization considerations Quality document transfer must be regarded as a global service, and any specification must have consideration for: o {1} transferring documents whose contents are expressed in a variety of national symbol sets. o {2} transferring documents whose contents are expressed in a variety of national languages (in some cases, the language of the content may be important to its rendering; e.g. text-to-speech processing). o {3} document transfer destination adressess that may be expressed in a variety of national symbol sets (e.g. the names of a person to whom a document is addressed). NOTE: There are a number of documents covering internationalization issues: RFC 2130 [6], RFC 2277 [7] and others [8]. 6. Security considerations This document describes the goals for the Internet Fax protocol, including the security goals. An Internet Fax protocol must {1} address the security goals and provide adequate measures to provide users with expected security features. Klyne & Shockey Work-in-progress [Page 11] Internet Draft Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer 18 October 1999 7. Full copyright statement Copyright (C) The Internet Society 1999. All Rights Reserved. This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than English. The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns. This document and the information contained herein is provided on an "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. 8. Acknowledgements [[[TBD]]] 9. References [1] RFC 2305, "A Simple Mode of Facsimile Using Internet Mail" K. Toyoda H. Ohno J. Murai, WIDE Project D. Wing, Cisco Systems March 1998. [2] RFC 2532, "Extended Facsimile Using Internet Mail" Larry Masinter, Xerox Corporation Dan Wing, Cisco Systems September 1998. Klyne & Shockey Work-in-progress [Page 12] Internet Draft Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer 18 October 1999 [3] "Procedures for document facsimile transmission in the general switched telephone network" ITU-T Recommendation T.30 (1996) International Telecommunications Union July 1996 [4] RFC 2542, "Terminology and Goals for Internet Fax" Larry Masinter, Xerox Corporation September 1998 [5] IPP [6] RFC 2130, "The Report of the IAB Character Set Workshop" C. Weider, Microsoft C. Preston, Preston & Lynch K. Simonsen, DKUUG H. Alvestrand, UNINETT R. Atkinson, Cisco Systems M. Crispin, University of Washington P. Svanberg, KTH April 1997. [7] RFC 2277, "IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages" H. Alvestrand, UNINETT January 1998. [8] <<>> [9] T.4 [10] T.6 [11] TIFF-FX [12] E.164 [13] SMTP [14] RFC822 [15] MDN/DSN reporting extensions [16] RFC 2533 [17] RFC 2531 [18] T.30 mapping document [19] RFC 1891 (DSN) Klyne & Shockey Work-in-progress [Page 13] Internet Draft Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer 18 October 1999 [20] RFC 2298 (MDN) [21] Cover page proposal [22] RFC 867 (Daytime) [23] RFC 868 (Time) [24] RFC 1305 (NTP) [25] RFC 2030 (SNTP) 10. Authors' addresses Graham Klyne (editor) 5th Generation Messaging Ltd. Content Technologies Ltd. 5 Watlington Street 1220 Parkview, Nettlebed Arlington Business Park Henley-on-Thames, RG9 5AB Theale United Kingdom Reading, RG7 4SA United Kingdom. Telephone: +44 118 930 1300 +44 1491 641 641 Facsimile: +44 118 930 1301 +44 1491 641 611 E-mail: GK@ACM.ORG Richard Shockey Shockey Consulting LLC 8045 Big Bend Blvd Suite 100 St. Louis, MO 63119 Telephone: +1 314 918 9020 Facsimile: +1 314 918 9015 E-mail/IFAX: rshockey@ix.netcom.com Klyne & Shockey Work-in-progress [Page 14] Internet Draft Terminology and Goals for Quality Document Transfer 18 October 1999 Appendix A: Revision history [[[Please remove this section on publication]]] 00a 23-Jul-1999 Initial draft, based on an earlier document by Richard Shockey. 00b 08-Sep-1999 Incorporate Richard's review comments. 01a 04-Oct-1999 Align goals more closely with RFC 2542; remove some text that duplicates RFC 2542. 01b 18-Oct-1999 Re-work introductory text slightly. TODO: o Complete terminology section -- identify key terms here. o Finalize references o Separate "operational" and "functional" goals? (section 4 intro) o Separate confirmation of receipt/proof of delivery? 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