APPLCORE user requirements

The charter of the APPLCORE group should include
investigation of user needs. The "users" for APPLCORE are
the future application protocols, which are to use it, and
the developers of these protocols.

Since we cannot know exactly what the user needs will be of
future protocols, we might start by looking at common user
needs of existing application protocols.

Here is an initial list of possible such user requirements.
I am not saying that all these should be user requirements,
but that we should consider for each of them, whether they
are to be satisfied by the core protocol or not.

(1)  Connection establishment with various levels of
     authentication and authorization.

(2)  Capability negotiation (something like in ESTMP?).

(3)  Transfer of data structures (like is done by RFC822
     header syntax, MIME multiparts or XML).

(4)  Transfer of both textual and binary data, including
     video, images, and arbitrary files.

(5)  Character set and natural language issues.

(6)  Syntax specification languages like ABNF.

(7)  Semantic specification languages. (The MUST, SHOULD,
     etc. rules of IETF is a rudimentary such language, is this
     enough, or do we want more?)

(8)  Cache/replication control/management.

(9)  Extension mechanism, including critical and non-critical
     extension. (A critical extension is an extension which
     must cause rejection by an agent which does not understand
     it. A non-critical extension is an extension which can
     be ignored or tunnelled by an agent which does not
     understand it.)

(10) Firewalls (how to pass them, how to allow them to stop
     what they are designed to stop).

(11) Content-Transfer-Encoding negotiation.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme

Received on Tuesday, 16 March 1999 08:08:26 UTC