Comments on Telephony-URL draft
lwc@roke.co.uk (Lawrence Conroy) Fri, 27 August 1999 19:29 UTC
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Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 20:28:32 +0100
To: pint@lists.research.bell-labs.com
From: lwc@roke.co.uk
Subject: Comments on Telephony-URL draft
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In answer to the request for comments on the Telephony-URL final call, herewith:: Generally, it's an excellent piece of work. Many thanks to Antti! Specifically, there are a couple of bits that I would like to be changed slightly to align with what we have already in PINT - I think these changes will help to expand the Telephony-URL into something that can specify pretty much any kind of telephone address. * The name "Area Specifier" and it's tag 'area'. Please can we change these to something different? It has caused confusion with the term 'area codes' used in North America, when it it much more flexible in scope. My vote's for "phone-context", as we use this neutral term in the PINT draft already (and it means I don't have to go through and change them all :). * Area-specifier allowed values; In PINT we have two options not covered in the Telephony-URL draft. These are local-context and private-context. (i) Local Context In those cases where there is an implicit "enclosing context" that is known to both the sender and recipient of a Telephony-URL, then the value of the area-specifier may usefully discard this enclosing context. If this is done then the area-specifier holds a local number form (rather than the fully qualified value). This could be useful where the recipient is connected to a private network, and the phone-context could indicate, for example, the PBX number. An E.164 number form would be inappropriate in this case (IMHO) as a context. (ii) Private Context An alternative is also allowed in the PINT draft, and could usefully be added to the Telephony-URL draft; this is the concept of 'private contexts'. I'm not completely happy with the name private context (contributions gratefully received :), but the aim is to allow whatever characters are needed as a context in this case. In the PINT draft we suggested that such a context should start with an x-token, and MUST start with a character that is neither a digit nor a '+' so that it can be deleniated from either a global of local "public" context. This could be particularly useful in indicating, for example, one of a number of private number plans; in this case, the x-token could indicate in text form the name of the private number plan (e.g. X-IBM-vnet). * The syntax proposed for future-extension may have an implication on the users of Telephony-URLs (such as SIP). The form suggested seems pretty flexible, but is a tad more restrictive than that proposed in RFC2543. Seems OK to me - comments from anyone else? ---------------------- In summary... The collected BNF covering these is as follows, (and would replace the BNF for area-specifier shown in the current Telephony-URL draft). area-specifier = phone-context-tag "=" phone-context-ident phone-context-tag = "phone-context" phone-context-ident = network-prefix / private-prefix network-prefix = intl-network-prefix / local-network-prefix intl-network-prefix = "+" 1*<DIGIT> local-network-prefix = 1*<DIGIT> private-prefix = 1*excldigandplus 0*<uric> excldigandplus = (0x21-0x2d,0x2f,0x40-0x7d) (I'd like to keep the 'phone-context-tag' intermediate token if possible, as we use it in the PINT BNF and it would mean we don't have to keep the documents synchronised by cutting and pasting). All the best, Lawrence ----------------------------------------------------------------------- | Lawrence Conroy, | "These Opinions must be mine, 'cos if they | | Roke Manor Research | were my Company's they'd charge you for them"| |- lwc@roke.co.uk ---+- Tel: +44 1794 833666 Fax: +44 1794 833434 --|
- Comments on Telephony-URL draft Lawrence Conroy