t.petch wrote: > > From: "Andrew Sullivan" <ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > > > > Supppse we actually have the following problems: > > > > 1. People think that it's too hard to get to PS. (Never mind the > > competing anecdotes. Let's just suppose this is true.) > > > > 2. People think that PS actually ought to mean "Proposed" and not > > "Permanent". (i.e. people want a sort of immature-ish level for > > standards so that it's possible to build and deploy something > > interoperable without first proving that it will never need to > > change.) > > > > 3. We want things to move along and be Internet STANDARDs. > > > > 4. Most of the world thinks "RFC" == "Internet Standard". > > I think that this point is crucial and much underrated. I would express > slightly differently, That, for most of the world, an RFC is a Standard > produced by the IETF, and that the number of organisations that know > differently are so few in number, even if some are politically > significant, that they can be ignored. The underlying question is acutally more fundamental: do we want to dillute specification so much that there will be multiple incompatible / non-interoperable versions of a specification for the sake of having a document earlier that looks like the real thing? There have been incompatible versions of C++ drafts (and compilers implementing it) over many years. HD television went through incompatible standards. WiFi 802.11 saw numerous of "draft-N" and "802.11g+" products. ASN.1 went through backwards incompatible revisions. Java/J2EE went through backwards-incompatible revisions. Publishing a specification earlier, with the provision "subject to change" appears somewhat unrealistic and counterproductive to me. It happens regularly that some vendor(s) create an installed base that is simply to large to ignore, based on early proposals of a spec, and not necessarily a correct implementation of the early spec -- which is realized after having created an installed base of several millions or more... Would the world be better off if the IETF had more variants of IP-Protocols (IPv7, IPv8, IPv9 besides IPv4 and IPv6)? Or if we had SNMP v4+v5+v6 in addition to v3 (and historic v2)? Or if we had HTTP v1.2 + v1.3 + v1.4 in addition to HTTPv1.0 & v1.1? I do not believe that having more incompatible variants of a protocol is going to improve the situation in the long run, and neither do I believe in getting entirely rid of cross-pollination by issuing WG-only documents as "proposed standards". What other motivation could there be to publishing documents earlier than vendors implementing and shipping it earlier? And if they do that, there is hardly any room for any substantial or backwards- incompatible changes. And the size of the installed base created by the early adopters significantly limits usefulness of any features or backwards-compatible changes that are incorporated into later revisions of the document. -Martin _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf