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Concluded WG Application CORE Protocol (applcore)

Note: The data for concluded WGs is occasionally incorrect.

WG Name Application CORE Protocol
Acronym applcore
Area Applications Area (app)
State Concluded
Charter charter-ietf-applcore-01 Approved
Document dependencies
Personnel Chair Chris Newman

Final Charter for Working Group

The IETF has traditionally developed application protocols directly on
top of a raw TCP stream.  However, there is a growing set of problems
which many application protocols have to solve regardless of what the
protocols do.  This WG will identify the common problems that deployed
IETF protocols have solved, identify the successes and failures that
deployed IETF protocols made when addressing these problems and design
a simple core protocol to address these problems.  This core protocol
may then be used by future application protocols to simplify both the
process of protocol design and the complexity of implementing
multi-protocol clients or servers.

In order to keep the WG in focus, the following items are explicitly
out-of-scope:

  • Backwards compatibility with existing application protocols
      Backwards compatibility often compromises correct design.  If this
      WG is successful it will impact a great number of future protocols,
      and thus the design errors which backwards compatibility might
      dictate must be avoided.

  • Transport layers other than TCP/IP
      This has been a rathole in too many other WGs.

  • Protocol models outside the traditional IETF client-server TCP
      application protocol model.
      The IETF doesn't have sufficient past experience in these areas.

  • New features
      If a problem hasn't been solved in at least two deployed IETF
      application protocols, then it is out-of-scope for the base core
      protocol spec.  This does not preclude individuals or other groups
      from doing extensions to the core protocol which might be used by
      multiple future application protocols; it just limits the scope of
      the core spec.

  • Normative references to other application protocols or non-public
    specs.
    The core protocol has to stand by itself.  It may reference protocol
      building blocks that have been used by several other application
      protocols such as ABNF, language tags, UTF-8, domain names, URLs,
      MIME, SASL, GSSAPI and TLS.  It must avoid normative references to
      full application protocols such as ACAP, HTTP, IMAP, LDAP, and SMTP.
      It must avoid normative references to any document which is not
      freely and publicly available on the Internet.