> Sheesh!--next you'll be telling us that you never heard the phrase > "out of scope" before last week. Sure I have. There's hardly a piece of work done by the IETF that someone hasn't claimed to be out of scope. It's just that the phrase is not used consistently. If we look at the historical facts about the work that the IETF has traditionally taken on, it's hard to draw any conclusion other than that anything is in scope which promotes and facilitates the use of the Internet and of IP infrastructure. And I think that's exactly what the IETF should be doing. > The example I'm thinking about involved predecessors to OpenGL. As this example doesn't even involve communication over a network, I would agree that it is out of scope. But that's a rather extreme case, most of the contentious areas do involve communications over an IP infrastructure. > Often the brutal WG chairs say they don't think the WG knows enough, but > it's the scope arguments that carry the day. I've never had much luck myself with scope arguments, unless they could be backed up with an argument either that the center of expertise is elsewhere, or that the topic has no bearing on IP. Of course, people will sometimes be willing to agree that the center of expertise is elsewhere without necessarily agreeing that they themselves aren't experts ;-) Sometimes scope arguments are merely face-saving ways of saying "we don't know what we are doing". Other times, scope arguments are merely "polite" ways of saying "we don't think you know what you are doing". You almost never hear someone saying "that sounds like a really good idea, but unfortunately it is out of scope".