Technical Summary
The Message Session Relay Protocol (MSRP) defines a mechanism for
sending instant messages within a peer-to-peer session, negotiated using
the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and the Session Description
Protocol (SDP). This document defines the necessary tools for
establishing multi-party chat sessions, or chat rooms, using MSRP.
Working Group Summary
There has been controversy about doing this work in SIMPLE. The XCON
working group was chartered to do create similar mechanisms in a media
independent fashion. There was a compromise consensus to do this draft
in SIMPLE with the idea that, with its smaller scope, it could complete
more quickly than the XCON work, and that it would be a short-term
solution until XCON completed the more general work.
This in fact did not occur, as this draft took longer than expected due
to several editor changes. Discussion at the SIMPLE meeting at IETF75
concluded that we should capture the parts of this draft were specific
about mixing MSRP at a conference bridge, but abandon the rest in favor
of XCON. However, this conclusion did not achieve consensus when brought
it to the working group list at large.
We readdressed this on the SIMPLE list in September 2010. A few
participants strongly argued that the work should be abandoned, as it
conflicted with (now substantially complete) work in XCON. But others
(including at least one implementor) argued for completion. In
particular, several people argued that this draft enabled them to build
a light weight text-chat service without requiring all the features
enabled by XCON. Note that the XCON working group has since completed
its work and closed.
In summary, the working group originally had a consensus to complete
this work, and has not achieved a consensus to change that plan.
We had agreement to pubreq version 07 in late 2010. The shepherd found
some issues during the PROTO review. The work group discussed the
substantive changes since version 07 on list, and we had a
similar consensus to pubreq version 11 without a new WGLC
The apps area review turned up some issues with the internationalization
of nicknames. The related updates, as well as a new normative dependency
on the PRECIS work, have been vetted on the SIMPLE list.
Document Quality.
The document has quite a bit of review over its lifespan in the SIMPLE
work group. It lists Eva Leppanen, Adamu Haruna, Adam Roach, Matt
Lepinski, Mary Barnes, Ben Campbell, Paul Kyzivat, Adrianv Georgescu,
and Nancy Greene as reviewers in the acknowledgments.
The document has undergone an MMUSIC expert review (Flemming Andreasen), since
it contains an SDP extension. It has been through WGLC, multiple consensus calls,
as well as an IETF last call. It has had 2 Gen-ART reviews (Christer Holmberg as Suresh Krishnan)
, as well as IANA, apps-dir (Alexey Melnikov),
tsv-dir (Cullen Jennings), and sec-dir (Vincent Roca) reviews. The
shepherd believes that all issues raised in these reviews have been resolved.
There are at least two existing implementations, "Blink" as a client and
"SylkServer" as a server. A few others have indicated the intent to
implement it. Additionally, the GSMA RCS 5.1 specification references this
document in order to use the a=chatroom attribute.
Personnel
The document shepherd for this document is Ben Campbell.
The responsible Area Director is Robert Sparks.