----- Original Message ----- From: "Ayyasamy, Senthilkumar (UMKC-Student)" <saq66@xxxxxxxx> To: "Bob Braden" <braden@xxxxxxx>; <fred@xxxxxxxxx> Cc: <ietf@xxxxxxxx> Sent: Monday, January 19, 2004 1:42 AM Subject: RE: The IETF Mission > Let's now consider usability grounds. The "pet" idea RFC series doesn't > serve the purpose: > > o If one is revisiting the old ideas, they will most likely prefer > mailing list archives (due to its descriptive nature) than RFC. Ummm, no. Most IETF mailing lists are pretty inaccessible to non-WG participants because no one ever summarizes ideas before WG last call. Some are more inaccessible because of posting volume levels. Some are becoming more inaccessible because they don't restrict posting to members and are filling their archives with spam. Professional networking researchers might have time, but might not, and people doing prior art searches for ideas that they've just been sued over might make time, but if our mailing list archives continue to be our institutional memory, we'll continue to suffer from Alzheimers (except that we lose our minds first-in-first-out, while Alzheimers takes your mind last-in-first-out). It's not like people who weren't there can find things easily in the RFC series (note the recent discussion on end-to-end as the TCP research community realized that they weren't sure what was, and was not, TCP). I-D draft respositories are an order of magnitude more difficult to search, because ideas come, go, and come again in the lifetime of discussion of a draft (and because, sadly, we rename drafts for almost no reason when they are adopted as WG items, and gratuitously challenge people to associate individual draft history with WG draft history). Mailing list archives are an order of magnitude more difficult than that (for the reasons previously stated). Spencer