Hi Phillip,
At 16:37 19-02-2014, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
The whole process has been odd.
I told Jari and Barry that I was appealing the decision in
Vancouver. I was told to raise it with the relevant AD first. By the
time he had come to a decision it was that too much effort had gone
into building things on top of CBOR since to undo the original decision.
I now realize that what I should have done was to simply send the
original appeal to the IETF list and not gone through channels as requested.
The RFC was published before the Vancouver meeting. There was a
four-weeks Last Call before that. This was an extremely late
appeal. There were some red flags during the Last Call. I assumed
that somebody would have noticed them and done something about that.
But now we have a binary encoding published on IETF standards track
that is not a binary encoding of JSON but has a subset that could be
used to encode JSON sitting in that spot. It isn't a consensus
document, isn't a product of open process, it is however on IETF
standards track. So the job for anyone doing the job properly has
become harder.
I'll suggest writing a (technical) draft about the topic and getting
it published by the ISE.
The way I think the process should work is:
1) The IAB identifies the need for a consensus binary encoding for
JSON as a platform the IETF community can build on (or why call it
an architecture board).
2) People write drafts that elaborate on the requirements and/or
propose schemes that meet them, these are published as either
EXPERIMENTAL or INFORMATIONAL.
3) People who are building applications that build on the platform
kick the tires and decide which ones they like / hate etc. Either a
consensus emerges that one encoding is best in which case we can go
to step 4, otherwise we go back to step 2.
4) PROPOSED STANDARD status is awarded in recognition of the fact
that there is a defacto standard that application protocol designers
have converged on. This may involve spinning up a working group to
clean up the documents or not depending on their quality.
[snip]
So I would like to see the IAB actually doing the job of an
architecture board and identifying gaps in the IETF stack where
convergence on one particular way of solving a problem would be
beneficial. That is not saying that they should be the people
providing the solution.
The reason for a charter is to inform people of the work which will
be done. In practice, most people do not pay attention to that.
I don't think that (2) and (3) is workable as it can lead to
polarized discussions where it would be difficult to reach
agreement. By the way, (4) is what Internet Standard is supposed to be.
Regards,
S. Moonesamy