> I
remember Bill Clinton describing trying to develop an Internet standard like
'nailing jello to the wall'.
Actually he said that trying to
censor the Internet was like trying to nail jello to the wall. See the press
release from the U.S. Embassy in China where he made the remark in the
context of the Great Firewall of
China.
With hindsight, and knowing the
many ways in which people have subverted the Great Firewall he was quite right.
In the IETF context, I think it proves the rule of "be conservative about what
you send, be liberal about what you accept" because the jello comes from the way
people actually use IETF technology in the real
world.
The IETF is incapable of designing a
solution to a problem. We can only design protocols which create possibilities
for the real solution designers to leverage. Engineers like to have end-to-end
control of a problem in order to design end-to-end solutions but that is often
not possible in the real world, and especially not possible when your work is
restricted to the vicinity of layer 3.
--Michael
Dillon
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