Re: Communication means in draft-ietf-impp-cpim-pidf-05

I think this was a good question, but illustrates more definitional problems.

According to Adrian, the communication means is defined by the scheme of the contact parameter. We see both "im" and "sip" being used. But these are very different kinds of things. 

- Using sip as the communication means doesn't tell you a lot - it doesn't say whether you can use this for voice, or for SIMPLE based IM, or for video, or all of the above. 

- Using "im" as the scheme doesn't have that ambiguity, but neither does it define a "means". It defines a communications medium. There will presumably be a number of im implementations (means?) that are cpim compatible that this could work with, but perhaps no way be assuring that they can all talk to any given "im" address.

At least when using sip urls as contact addresses, it will be important to be able to describe the media that the contact is willing to use currently. This could be done with added status values.

	Paul

Adrian Bateman wrote:
> 
> On 29 August 2002 17:49, [email protected] wrote:
> > The question is that how can the watcher figure out from the example
> > below what is the communication mean of the provided contact address.
> It could
> > be "voice", "video", even "im", etc.
> >
> >  <tuple id="a67uyt76">
> >        <status>
> >          <basic>open</basic>
> >        </status>
> >        <contact priority="1.0">sip:[email protected]</contact>
> >  </tuple>
> 
> The communication means looks like SIP to me. For example, if you want
> IM, I'd expect you to see something like im:[email protected].
> 
> Adrian.



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