[1126] in Release_7.7_team
Draft Charter: Connect The Dots Project
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Thu Oct 2 19:39:55 1997
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997 19:39:52 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: lcs@MIT.EDU, mbarker@MIT.EDU
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
Larry and I sat down, and I typed this in off the top of my head while
he kibitz'ed. What did I miss?
-wdc
Draft Charter: Connect The Dots Project
The Connect The Dots Project has two intended outcomes:
1. To enable the diverse community of Mac, PC, and Unix users to have
graceful exchange of a critical mass of useful email enclosures.
2. To provide basic MIME support for the Athena Computing Environment to
enable the support of the most common and useful media types and
character sets. (Possibly foreign language support, for example Kanji.)
Deliverables:
Rationale document naming why each enclosure and media type was
selected for support. (Like one sentence per each)
Document naming why a particular member of a competing set of support
methods was chosen. (Like one paragraph per media type.)
mailcap for mh
procedures for users of Eudora, and mh for handling enclosures
minimal support scripts and/or utilities for incorporation into the
Athena Release
Stakeholders:
0. Users of electronic mail on Athena and internally to IS who are
interested in exchanging enclosures and/or dealing with multimedia
and/or multiple character sets.
1. The CWIS-Dev group maintains a set of mailcap files for WWW use. The
developments of the CTD Project will build on the CWIS-Dev experience
and interoperate as gracefully as possible.
2. The Network Operations Group needs to be involved with the choices
made on supported media types. Some media types will need to be
deprecated as having an upleasant effect on the MIT net operationally.
3. The Athena Release Team needs to minimize the amount of additional
third party software incorporated into the Athena Release. Only a
critical mass of tools should be incorporated. Less commonly used tools
should be kept in separate lockers. The dependencies need to be
documented explicitly.
4. There is an issue of long term evolution for the handling of
different media types. The support must be done with an eye to the
evolution of the tools and user customization. One important criteria
for success of this effort is that the basic mailcap provided in the
Athena release works well enough for long enough that many private hacks
do not evolve. Private hacks require unaccountable amounts of support
as they become obsolete.
Overal idea:
Support a few common media types by default.
Make the support of advanced media types explicit and as robust as
possible against obsolescence.
