Subject: [Simple] Extending <status> for presence

From: "Vijay K. Gurbani" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2003 17:06:52 -0600

Hello:

<draft-ietf-impp-cpim-pidf-06.txt> discusses extending the <status>
element beyond sub-element <basic>.  <basic> defines coarse grained
information -- 'open' or 'close' only.

Is there any work underway to extend <status> element and define more
fine-grained presence/availability information, such as 'away', 'be back
in 5 minutes', 'out to lunch', 'busy', etc.?

I looked at <draft-ietf-simple-presence-09.txt> but while it notes that
"[h]istorically, presence has been limited to "on-line" and "off-line"
indicators;", I do not see anywhere in that I-D where it extends
<status> to something beyond "on-line" and "off-line".

Thanks,

- vijay
-- 
Vijay K. Gurbani  vkg@{lucent.com,research.bell-labs.com,acm.org}
Wireless Networks Group/Internet Software and Services
Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs Innovations, 2000 Lucent Lane, Rm 6G-440
Naperville, Illinois 60566     Voice: +1 630 224 0216

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From: Paul Kyzivat <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2003 18:29:29 -0500

Vijay,

Yes, there is work underway. Two current relevant active drafts are:
   draft-kyzivat-simple-prescaps-reqts-00.txt
   draft-lonnfors-simple-prescaps-ext-00.txt

However, they probably don't cover what you are looking for. At IETF55, 
the authors of the above were asked to evolve them to address the more 
general IM status issues such as you mention. We have been discussing 
that privately, and are working on revisions.

It would be very useful to have a few people to use as references, who 
have detailed knowledge about the various popular IM systems at large.

I can tell you right off that one thing I *don't* intend to do is define 
xml status values like <out-to-lunch>. Instead, I am trying to identify 
more primitive status elements that can be combined to represent the 
various states that different IM systems use. (<basic> is of course one 
of those primitive elements.)

If you can act as an expert about one or more existing systems, or if 
you have specific suggestions, I would be interested in hearing from 
you. (As far as I'm concerned you don't need to know the code to be an 
expert. An experienced and observant user is probably sufficient.)

	Paul

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From: Jonathan Rosenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 12:41:53 -0500

Paul Kyzivat wrote:

> xml status values like <out-to-lunch>.

Some more about this. We've had extensive discussions for quite a while 
on this. The general conclusion, I think, is that things like "out to 
lunch" are best done by a note which is consumed by a person. You only 
need new status types if they are consumed by an automata. Its not clear 
to anyone that an automata would ever need to know that you are out to 
lunch, as opposed to simply not available, where CLOSED would suffice.

One potential usage for these statuses is the display of an icon on the 
watcher's system. I am intimately familiar with Yahoo, which today has 
three icons. These indicate available, not-available, and idle. That 
does beg the question if we need to have an idle status.

I suppose another way to handle icons is to send a URI as part of the 
presence which poitns to the icon. However, I can imagine that you'd 
want to render the icons differently on different devices; a PC might be 
ok with a 20x20 jpeg, but that is not going to fly on a wireless phone, 
which needs something smaller. In that case, sending a status with a 
defined meaning, which each local watcher can map to a 
device-appropriate icon, would make more sense.

So, would someone ever want to build a system with an "out-to-lunch" 
icon? Possibly. Certainly not outside the realm of possibility. Where to 
draw the line is always the question...

-Jonathan R.

-- 
Jonathan D. Rosenberg, Ph.D.                72 Eagle Rock Ave.
Chief Scientist                             First Floor
dynamicsoft                                 East Hanover, NJ 07936
[email-masked]                     FAX:   (973) 952-5050
http://www.jdrosen.net                      PHONE: (973) 952-5000
http://www.dynamicsoft.com

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From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 17:20:23 -0500

> draw the line is always the question...

Generally, I find systems that have tokens far better than systems that 
try to guess at human-entered strings. (We have far too many conventions 
for this in email subject lines, from Urgent to ADV.)

What is the disadvantage of registering a number of status indications? 
If an entity doesn't know the particular status, it can always use the 
default rendering for open/closed.

Beyond the icon problem, text has the disadvantage that it is very hard 
to internationalize and much harder, except by error-prone heuristics, 
to render into non-text items, such as particular sounds (for ADA 
compliance) and such.

My suggestion would be three things: An extensible list of status 
objects, including the ability to provide things like 
com.dynamicsoft.at_ietf, a "hint" for an icon (like you suggest) and a 
note for human consumption.

The problem with the icon hint that it can provide a leaky backchannel 
to see when somebody looked at your presence information. From that, you 
can probably deduce the watcher's presence information...

Henning