Session Date/Time: 10 Sep 2024 18:00

TOOLS

Summary

The TOOLS working group held its monthly call to discuss ongoing infrastructure projects and report on progress. Key topics included the significant delay in the email transition due to Amazon SES limitations, the upgrade strategy for Zulip, improvements to the Mediaco session player, ongoing denial-of-service issues affecting the Data Tracker, and substantial progress on RFC Editor tools. A major discussion centered on an accessibility report for RFC HTML/SVG, highlighting a significant challenge with older RFC formats.

Key Discussion Points

Email Transition to New Infrastructure: The transition is significantly delayed. Amazon SES, initially planned for use, was found to rewrite Message-ID and Date headers, which breaks critical end-to-end message signaling techniques like DKIM and violates user expectations. Exploring other options has begun.
Zulip Upgrade: Zulip has been upgraded to the 8.x series. The upcoming 9.x series introduces significant model and UI changes (e.g., "streams" become "channels"). A staging instance of Zulip 9 will be set up with a transition database to solicit community feedback before a full migration.
Mediaco Sessions Player: All IETF and interim meeting sessions hosted on mediaco.com are now being uploaded to an R2 bucket managed by LLC. Future links on Data Tracker will direct to mediacoplayer.ietf.org, offering synchronized chat, polls, and slides for playback. Cloudflare Workers are being utilized for the compute part of playing out sessions. It was noted that there is still impedance for recordings from non-Mediaco platforms to be fully attached to the Data Tracker as meeting artifacts.
Data Tracker Issues: The Data Tracker has experienced "borderline denial of service" incidents from heavy bot traffic, which is bypassing current Cloudflare protections. Long-term plans include reducing the computational cost of problematic API endpoints. In the short term, efforts involve blocking identified bot sources and mitigating configuration issues that allow query strings to bypass caching. Scaling the infrastructure is not considered a viable solution as it would likely lead to bots simply increasing their traffic.
BibXML Service and XMLRFC: Progress has been made in these areas, with content available in the meeting notes.
RFC Editor Workflow (RPC Project): Significant progress has resumed. Iterations with RPC staff, particularly on workflow management, have revealed that the "in-queuing" process for documents is multi-faceted, involving several actions and participants over time, rather than a single atomic event. The application model is being adjusted to reflect this. The next step is to deploy a CICD instance to allow the RPC to review changes in a live cloud environment.
RFC Editor Website: Bootstrapping of the new RFC Editor website has begun, leveraging technologies similar to the IPC website. The homepage, including desktop and responsive views and mobile menus, has seen initial implementation.
Yang Catalog: Text updates regarding the Yang catalog are available in the meeting notes.
Accessibility Report for HTML/SVG RFCs: The RFC Series Consulting Editor, Alexis Rossi, commissioned a detailed accessibility report (37 pages) from Prime Access Consulting on HTML and SVG RFCs.
- The report highlights useful insights, particularly concerning the experience of visually impaired users.
- A blog post with highlights is forthcoming, and guidelines will be added to the authors' website to help ID and RFC authors improve accessibility.
- A significant challenge exists with the initial ~8000 RFCs, where the HTML consists of a single <pre> block containing the text. Screen readers read every character, making these documents largely inaccessible.
- Manual conversion of these older RFCs to ARIA HTML to enable proper rendering through the modern pipeline is estimated to be a large undertaking, potentially requiring external funding or a grant (a wild guess of ~$1M was mentioned).
- Other approaches, such as using AI-related tools as a starting point for conversion or prioritizing non-obsoleted RFCs, were discussed as possibilities. A more formal discussion or working document for brainstorming ideas is needed, to be followed by consultant review.

Decisions and Action Items

Decision: The email transition project is significantly delayed due to the limitations of Amazon SES regarding Message-ID and Date header rewriting.
Decision: The model for "in-queuing" documents in the RFC Editor workflow project will be adjusted to reflect it as a multi-step process rather than a single action.
Action Item: The TOOLS WG/IETF Secretariat will continue to explore alternative options for the email infrastructure.
Action Item: Casara will set up a staging instance of Zulip 9 for community feedback before a full upgrade.
Action Item: Work will continue to address the impedance for attaching recordings from non-Mediaco platforms to the Data Tracker.
Action Item: Jennifer and the Data Tracker team will continue to mitigate bot traffic, block malicious users, and investigate configuration issues to reduce computational load.
Action Item: Alexis Rossi and Jay will publish a blog post summarizing the accessibility report.
Action Item: The RFC Editor will add accessibility guidelines to the authors' website.
Action Item: Jay and the community will brainstorm and discuss potential mechanisms (including AI tools or grants) for converting older RFCs to an accessible HTML format.
Action Item: The RPC project team will build and deploy a CICD instance to allow the RPC to review changes in a live cloud environment.
Action Item: Matthew will continue bootstrapping the new RFC Editor website, building out page templates.

Next Steps

Continued exploration and evaluation of email infrastructure alternatives.
Community review and feedback on the Zulip 9 staging instance.
Ongoing efforts to enhance Data Tracker resilience against bot traffic.
Continued development and iteration on the RFC Editor workflow and website projects.
Further discussion and strategy development regarding the accessibility of historical RFCs.
The next monthly call is scheduled for next month, followed by IETF 121.