John, Rather than discuss what's hyperbole and what's not, I direct your attention to http://www.ofcourseimright.com/pages/lear/spy.jpg. One could argue that things worked about as one would have expected perhaps through 1996 for draft standard. Beyond that it's clear that things went off the rail. For full, it's hard to argue they were ever really on the rail. Either that or we're truly producing a lot of schlock. I don't believe the latter. I think in general we're doing good work, and decruft hinted at that (although it couldn't conclusively demonstrate it because of the bounds of the experiment). For what it's worth, the methodology used was gluing bibliographical lines together from rfc-index.txt and then grepping "$YEAR." and each standard level out, followed by a word count for the result. This might possibly under-report PS documents that have been marked Historic through the decruft experiment. I haven't checked. Code available upon request. My point here is that the three step process is not used as intended. Existing practice clearly demonstrates that the vast majority of our work - far more than intended - never reaches beyond PS. This is reality. Simply documenting that fact in a new RFC2026bis would be to say, "Our standards are broken and we know they're broken." That's not what motivated me to write a draft. What motivated me to write a draft was that it's important that we say what we do and we do what we say. The 2nd step for me is a compromise, on the off chance someone really wants to demonstrate a higher level of interoperability, but the economic motivations not to mention the headaches involved with getting there do not lead me to have a lot of faith that it will be used either. But that didn't stop me from including it. Finally, I have no vote on the IESG, nor does my co-author. Our work carries only the moral authority you and others believe it should. The phrase "send text" is an invitation to the community to make it and our current state of affairs better, and by no means a threat. Rough consensus prevents most dumb ideas from getting through, but not all. I share your concerns that it is possible to make things worse, and I trust you'll be vocal as you have been if you believe that we're moving in the wrong direction. Eliot _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
