On 10/4/2019 12:48 PM, Nico Williams wrote:
The ITU-T has a much better document naming scheme, and they too have an immutability property. Thus ASN.1 is the x.680 document series (x.680, x.681, x.682) and the encoding rules for ASN.1 are the x.690 series, and each document gets a "version number" in the form of publication year and month, and old versions remain accessible and unchanged.
*laugh* But then you end up with weirdnesses like X.500 vs X.509. I *know* why the certificate stuff started out in Directory oh so many years ago, but in hindsight maybe not where it should be today?
Or you end up with something like DNS running out of series numbers and others requiring a series for a single document. ITU tends to be MUCH more formal about which documents and standards they will even start working on (e.g. a "work plan") before they ever start allocating numbers. They also *require* a document to reviewed each period of time and updated - that would be a substantial change to our model. Then you have things like TLS 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 that share a negotiating strategy and have similar protocols, but might be hard to characterize as the same protocol in the ISO model meaning.
If you go into the other direction, you get things like IEEE 802.11 which depends on 802.1 and has a bunch of sub standards ( *pun intended*) such as 802.11ac and that collection seems to change each time I go looking.
In any event I think it's TANSTAAFL - you pick one approach, you close off others and each has its own flaws.
I'm not opposed to having the conversation, but we need to pick something that works for how we do things, or we need to change how we do standards. And that's a conversation I'm not sure we're quite yet ready to have.
Later, Mike
