--On Thursday, January 11, 2018 22:07 +0300 Valery Smyslov
<smyslov.ietf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>...
> Not a big deal actually - go to a datatracker page
> and search for documents there. Just a small inconvinience.
First one needs to know that there is a datatracker page and
that document search is available there. That is a big deal
and, to me, has been what the discussion has been all about.
For those of us who have been around the IETF for some time and
are active in its work, this change is at best an annoyance. As
others have pointed out, we will bookmark the "real" page (which
better work and be free of dead links) and then move on, perhaps
while muttering under our collective breath. The new page
seems, as it has seemed all through this effort, to be optimized
for those who want to learn about what the IETF is about,
perhaps even those who know nothing more than how to spell
"IETF". I think that is a legitimate audience although I
personally think they (and we) would be better served by a
single, prominent, "About the IETF" link from the home page
rather than being the home page.
But this particular example highlights the problem with the way
this change has been supported. I believe that there are
statements and links all over the place that say things like "go
look at draft-ietf-foobar-bogon on the IETF page" or even "see
the IETF's RFC 92". I don't know how many there are, or where
they are, but the count is certainly above zero. One of the
logical things for someone who is trying to track down those
documents but doesn't know much about the IETF to do is to find
the IETF's home page and then search for the document name,
something that has worked for years. Now it doesn't work any
more because "search" on the IETF home page no longer includes
"search documents" but only seems to mean "search the IETF's web
pages" and, when used with a real, but expired, WG document now
returns a page that shows some tutorial material about creating
I-Ds, the IESG statement on removal of drafts, and some other
apparently-irrelevant material.
This does not make the Internet better or serve the broader
Internet community at all well.
IMO, this version is a considerable improvement over its
predecessors. If "Search the IETF email archive" were
supplemented by "Search the IETF document archive", it would
alleviate the specific problem mentioned above. But the longer
this goes on and the more iterations it goes through, the more
I'm convinced that the effort is just on (and has been on) the
wrong track.
john