> Ned, > On Apr 25, 2012, at 10:46 AM, Ned Freed wrote: > >> I see no value in deallocating code point spaces and a huge amount of potential harm. > > It depends on the size of the space. > Why? Because if you deallocate and reallocate it, there can be conflicts. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but a lot of times people continue to use stuff that IETF considers to be bad ideas, including but not limited to things we called experiments at some point. > We're talking about completed "experiments". It doesn't matter if we're talking about pink prancing ponies. The issue is whether or not the code point is valuable. If it isn't there's no reason to deallocate it and every reason not to, although you may want to deprecate it's use if the experiment proved to be a really bad idea. > I'm unclear I see any particular value in having IANA staff continue to > maintain registries (which is what I've translated "code point _spaces_" to) > for the protocol defined within the RFC(s) of that "experiment". Ah, I think I see the conflict. You're talking about experiments that define namespaces themselves, rather than using code points out of some other more general space, which is what I was talking about. That said, I have to say I reach pretty much the same conclusion for experimental code point spaces that I do for experimental use of code points in other spaces: They should not be deallocated/deleted. Again, just because the IETF deems an experiment to be over, or even if the IETF concludes that the experiement was a failure, doesn't mean people won't continue to use it. And getting rid of information that people may need to get things to interoperate seems to, you know, kinda go against some of our core principles. > I could, perhaps, see memorializing the final state of the registries for the > "experiment" in an informational RFC, but don't really see the point in > cluttering up http://www.iana.org/protocols with more junk than is already in > there. Trying to find things is already annoying enough. That's a problem with the organization of the web site, not an argument for getting rid of information. There are abundant examples of web sites that contains thousands of times as much stuff as IANA does where finding what you want is easy if not outright trivial. Ned