Martin Rex wrote: > John Leslie wrote: > > > > I'm pretty darn uncomfortable _ever_ picking a fight with any > > sitting AD, But I feel obligated to say this seems like a terrible > > idea to me. > > > > As a background, I'm a long-time believer in "rough consensus" for > > Proposed Standard and "running code" for advancement along the > > standards track. I do not believe the two mix well. > I don't have the resource to participate the discussion, but > these statements capture my opinion pretty well. I'm reluctantly going to have to join John and Martin, with one very important difference: I think there is huge value in implementing specifications during the process leading up to proposed standard. (As many people know, I do this myself quite often for drafts I'm interested in.) I would rather phrase it as having demonstrable interoperability for advancement, and ideally having implementations done much earlier. More specifically, where I part ways with this draft is in believing that very early implementation helps find interoperability issues. I have not found that to be the case. What it helps find are issues affecting implementability. In the applications area at least, it's surprisingly easy to specify things that look good on paper but turn out to suck when you try to code them. (My own sins in this area are well known - RFC 2231 - and one of the reasons for that it is one of the few RFCs I've written without implementing it first.) Now, it's quite true that implementability problems can lead to interoperability problems, like when different people take different shortcuts in coding an unnecessarily problematic specification. But other outcomes are possible, including fragility, unnecessary restrictions, and most especially scalability problems. Another problem with focusing on interoperability specifically as opposed to overall implementability is that it makes it hard to argue that one or two implementations provide that much benefit. In my experience having just one implementation, even one done by a draft author, is surprisingly helpful in cleaning up drafts. I guess what I would like to see is for the draft to talk a little more about finding implementation issues in general and a lot less about finding interoperability issues specifically. I also think the draft goes a bit far in the "carrots" it provides, but that may have more to do with my own experiences in the applications area, where important comments have a way of only showing up at the last second and where therefore the abbreviated process might be a little dangerous to use. Finally, I'm going to apologize for the tardiness of this comment, which really should have been made sooner. I'm also going to apologize in advance for probably not being able to fully participate in this discussion due to severe time constraints. Ned