Speaking of Standards

For those tracking the the “RTCWEB/WebRTC” initiative the next “virtual interim meeting” for the IETF side of the effort will be held on Thursday, September 8th. From the announcement email:

The RTCWEB working group plans to hold an interim meeting meeting. It will be held on September 8, 2011 at 7:00 A.M. PDT. We’re currently allocating 4 hours for the meeting. Details of participation will follow on the working group mailing list (http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/).

If you are already on the mailing list, you’ll get the announcements and agenda… if not, it’s a good time to join the mailing list!

P.S. And if you don’t know what any of this is about, see my last post.

Would you like to understand what the “RTCWEB/WebRTC” initiative is all about? And how it will enable real-time communications from within web browsers without the use of additional plugins or extensions? (like those in Flash, Quicktime, etc.)

A great place to start would be this Internet-Draft at:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rtcweb-overview

As the draft URL indicates, the document truly is an “overview” of the effort:

This document gives an overview and context of a protocol suite intended for use with real-time applications that can be deployed in browsers – “real time communication on the Web”.

It intends to serve as a starting and coordination point to make sure all the parts that are needed to achieve this goal are findable, and that the parts that belong in the Internet protocol suite are fully specified and on the right publication track.

The latest version, released today, includes a reference to the WebRTC specification released yesterday by the W3C.

Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in learning more about this very important industry effort.

As part of the ongoing RTCWEB/WebRTC initiative to enable real-time communications in web browsers without extra plugins or extensions, the W3C working group released its first draft of the API specification. It can be found at:

http://dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/webrtc.html

As that URL actually points to a version that will change as more edits are made, there is also a URL to a static version of what was released yesterday:

http://dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/webrtc-20110823.html

Discussion that led to the document happened up at the face-to-face meeting recently in Quebec… and continues on the public-webrtc mailing list, to which anyone can subscribe.

And yes, you’ll notice Voxeon Dan Burnett, our Director of Speech Technologies and point person on industry standards, as one of the co-editors of this document.

The RTCWEB/WebRTC effort is an incredibly important project… and I hope that as many of you as possible can take a look at the draft and contribute feedback on the (very active) mailing list.

Great to see!

Last week on July 12th, the W3C’s Web Real-Time Communications Working Group (“WebRTC” – one half of the overall “RTCWEB Initiative”) held a conference call to help advance the work of the group.

Group leader Harald Alvestrand posted a summary of the call to the public webrtc mailing list. A set of minutes was later sent to the list and an IRC log is also available. The main focus right now is on getting full clarity of the requirements and beginning to define the API.

There will also be a face-to-face meeting on Saturday, July 23rd, in Quebec City, Canada. Registration is open and a good number of folks are already planning to attend. The date was chosen because IETF 81 starts July 24th there in Queubec City and many of the W3C WebRTC participants will also be joining in the RTCWEB working group meeting of the IETF. (Confused, yet?)

More discussion of all of this can be found on the public-webrtc mailing list. Great discussion currently going on… the time to join is really now if you want to help shape how this communication occurs between browsers.

In about 20 minutes at 1pm US Eastern (5pm UTC), the “Web Real-Time Communications Working Group” of the W3C will be holding its first conference call. As announced yesterday, the call will primarily be about introductions, reviewing the working group charter and determining the next steps. If you are able to join today, the info is:

Phone: +1 617 761 6200 or SIP: zakim@voip.w3.org
Conference Code: 26631
IRC channel: #webrtc

If you aren’t able to attend but are interested in the effort, the best bet is to join the “public-webrtc” mailing list.

This is the W3C side of the “RTCWEB” initiative I’ve been writing about here, which is essentially looking at how we standardize real-time communications from within web browsers and other similar apps. Definitely an effort worth paying attention to!

The Real-Time Communications in WEB-browser (RTCWEB) Working Group within the IETF will be holding an “interim meeting” on:

Date: Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Time: 16:30-20:30 CEST
10:30-14:30 US Eastern time
7.30-11.30 US Pacific time

To discuss plans related to advancing the work outlined in the group’s charter. I’ve mentioned the “RTCWEB” initiative in the past and definitely believe it is both valuable and necessary. Although that same day is World IPv6 Day and I expect to be engaged in IPv6 promotion activities, I do plan to dial in to this interim meeting to listen and participate.

If you’d like to join in, the best bet is to subscribe to the IETF rtcweb mailing list as the agenda and attendance information will be circulated on that list.

For those of you following the ongoing “RTCWEB” work to bring about standards for real-time communications from within web browsers, there are now two new public mailing lists that you can join – and are where all the RTCWEB activity is now intended to happen.

On the IETF side, as part of the new charter for the RTCWEB work, there is now a mailing list at:

https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/rtcweb

You can subscribe and also view the archive from that page.

On the W3C side, a working group is still forming there, but the mailing list is now up for subscription at:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webrtc/

The W3C list was literally created today, so there has not yet been any activity on that list.

The work of the RTCWEB initiative is now moving into the standards bodies… and so if you want to monitor or participate in the work, you’ll need to join those mailing lists.

I’ve mentioned the “RTCWEB” initiative in the past and in particular the BOF session the group was having at IETF 80 this week in Prague. That session has now been held and Christer Holmberg nicely distributed some notes for those of us who couldn’t attend.

The end result seems to be that Harald Alvestrand has now distributed a revised charter for the IETF work which again sets out this overall goal:

There are a number of proprietary implementations that provide direct interactive rich communication using audio, video, collaboration, games, etc. between two peers’ web-browsers. These are not interoperable, as they require non-standard extensions or plugins to work. There is a desire to standardize the basis for such communication so that interoperable communication can be established between any compatible browsers. The goal is to enable innovation on top of a set of basic components. One core component is to enable real-time media like audio and video, a second is to enable data transfer directly between clients.

The charter is worth a read … and if you are interested in getting more involved, the best way is to join the rtc-web mailing list. It’s definitely a critical initiative in my mind… and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Related to the RTCWEB BOF coming up at IETF 80 at the end of the month, Cullen Jennings at Cisco just submitted an interesting Internet-Draft:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-rtcweb-api

The abstract is:

Internet browsers and other software applications are enabling support for real time interactive voice and video. This draft outlines a set of IETF protocols that can be used for this purpose and describes the overall architecture. It also identifies the requirements for an application programming interface to control these protocols.

Cullen then offers this overview:

This draft describes two models of how this would work, which are referred to as the advertisement proposal (AdProp) model and the offer answer (OffAns) model. Both of these models are useful in various situations, and they involve very similar code development efforts. This draft proposes an API and protocol set standardization that supports both models.

He provides a couple of use cases and then dives down into establishing a set of requirements:

The section defines the set of protocols and selected subset profiles of these protocols that a browser would need to implement, and forms the requirements for the API to control these protocols. At a high level we split this into connection management, transports for real time media such as audio and video, transports for non media data, codecs support, and signaling protocols.

Cullen then goes on to walk through a number of different protocol proposals, security issues and much more.

As I mentioned before, the RTCWEB initiative is a very important one in terms of ensuring that we do wind up with a standard way for browsers to connect to services using protocols such as SIP. I’d encourage you to take a look at his draft and send comment back either directly to Cullen and/or to the RTCWEB mailing list.

Are you interested in standardizing real-time communications over the Web? Of making sure that audio, video and other forms of collaboration can work from any web browsers? Potentially without any plugins?

That is essentially the mission of the “RTC-Web” initiative, a loose collection of people interested in making all of this work through the IETF and W3C standards processes. The initiative has an overall home at:

http://rtc-web.alvestrand.com/

And works primarily through this mailing list that is open to anyone to join (and yes, I’m on it):

http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/rtc-web

The group has obtained status as an official BOF at the upcoming IETF 80 meeting March 27 – April 1 in Prague and has info about the meeting at these URLs:

http://trac.tools.ietf.org/bof/trac/#RAI
http://tools.ietf.org/agenda/80/rtcweb.html

Note that in IETF lingo the BOF and associated docs are referred to as “RTCWEB” without a hyphen.

I like this description of what the BOF is all about:

Many implementations have been made that use a Web browser to support direct, interactive communications, including voice, video, collaboration, and gaming. In these implementations, the web server acts as the signaling path between these applications, using locally significant identifiers to set up the association. Up till now, such applications have typically required the installation of plugins or non-standard browser extensions. There is a desire to standardize this functionality, so that this type of application can be run in any compatible browser and allow for high-quality real-time communications experiences within the browser.

Unfortunately I won’t personally be in Prague, but I’ll definitely continue to monitor the activity of the group online. If you want to be sure we have open standards that allow real-time communication to work from within web browsers, I’d encourage you to participate in (or at least monitor) the activities of the group, too.