On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 11:11 AM, Dave Cridland <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > What concerns me with dropping Applications is that without applications, we > have an interesting academic exercise rather than a product. Dropping > Applications expertise is decreasing user focus from the IESG, and I don't > see how this is a positive step, or one in which the overall "relevance" of > the IETF will increase. What is proposed is to drop the Applications area. But there will still be Real-Time Applications. Absent an applications area to distinguish itself from, surely RAI becomes applications? So isn't this debate about merging RAI back into applications rather than killing apps? If we did kill off apps, what do we do if we need to revise SMTP? Now I don't think we will ever do SMTP but not for the reason Dave Crocker and John Klensin will agree with. Dividing messaging into different streams depending on whether it is real time or asynchronous is bogus. So is dividing on message size. So eventually there will be one protocol that covers SMTP, XMPP, NNTP, RSS, Social media and more and it will eventually replace all the legacy protocols.