On 15/01/2013 06:16, Dean Willis wrote:
...
> Seriously -- at what point does replacing all action verbs with 2119 language make the protocol spec LESS useful for compliance certification?
Wrong question. What we (the IETF) care about is the existence of interoperable
implementations, not mathematical compliance.
If you ask "at what point does replacing all action verbs with 2119 language make
the protocol spec LESS useful for coding interoperable versions?", I think
the answer will be something like "when it makes the spec so ugly and
difficult to read that people get things wrong as a result."
On 15/01/2013 06:19, Dean Willis wrote:
> On Jan 5, 2013, at 10:03 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> > And, again, that is further complicated by the observation that
>> > IETF Standards are used for procurement and even for litigation
>> > about product quality. We either need to accept that fact and,
>> > where necessary, adjust our specification style to match or we
>> > run the risk of bodies springing up who will profile our
>> > Standards, write procurement-quality conformance statements for
>> > their profiles, and become, de facto, the real standards-setter
>> > for the marketplace (and obviously do so without any element of
>> > IETF consensus).
>
> I'm not sure that's not a good thing. Witness for example the work SIP Forum has done with the SIPConnect standards, which have made it MUCH easier to order a box that will work with a SIP Trunking service.
I think there are cases of standards of extreme complexity, such as
SIP, where such profiles may be useful, because otherwise interoperability
cannot be achieved. But perhaps the lesson for the IETF here is slightly
different - don't design standards which allow that degree of complexity
in the first place.
Brian