On 3/2/21 1:28 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
What Google needed for their immediate commercial needs was a simple archive technology that zips up a few Web page components delivered over HTTP/TLS. So they wrote a very narrow spec that only addressed their use case and then came to IETF to get it blessed as a niche solution. But it is a solution that was designed with absolutely no thought to the wider problem. They didn't want to consider the wider problem at all.
That kind of tension between different ideas of how to scope an
effort always exists. I agree that IETF often scopes its WGs too
narrowly, sometimes in a deliberate effort to create an artificial
sense of consensus. And by doing so, it often fails to resolve
tussles that could have probably been resolved. But sometimes
you simply can't get enough of the different concerns to cooperate
to address a common problem. And you can fail by scoping an
effort too widely at least as easily as you can fail by scoping an
effort too narrowly. It's a judgment call, and sometimes those
judgments will be better than others.
Keith
