ietf-822
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Re: Q+A: Mnemonic to Proposed Standard

1992-04-03 15:31:32
But now tell me -- is Keld's document the sort of document that the
822ext WG can put its stamp of approval on?

I'd say "No". Many of the people in this WG are relatively clueless as
far as character sets are concerned. (I am one of them.) This WG would
be slapping the true experts in the face if it approves the document
for publication as an informational RFC. It would be presumptuous to
say the least.

Well, I'm also in the clueless group and I'd love to hand this off to
the experts.  Where are they?  Which working group would that be?  Or
should one be formed, quickly?  If there's no place to punt to, I'd
recommend trying to resolve the technical problems within this group
as best we can.  I don't think that slaps anybody's face, at least not
intentionally.  Besides, I've seen evidence that at least some of the
wg members have enough experience to provide a useful evaluation of the
proposal.

The issues I see are, 1) accuracy of the information; 2) conflict with
the co-existing Viet-net convention; 3) lower level of usefulness with
non-alphabetic languages; 4) exactly what is the level of standardization
we are recommending, and what does conformance to that standard mean (in
and of itself, NOT in relationship to MIME)?

No doubt there are others, but these have been consistently raised and
I don't think we have reached consensus yet.  Can we map out a plan to
resolve these (and any additional) issues?  As part of that plan, maybe
we should define the end state for each.  If we can agree on that (I
remain hopeful), we should be able to figure out how to get there from
here.

1) is kind of tied to 4).  I'm assuming experimental status implies
allowing a thorough test period to guarantee accuracy.  Proposed seems
to require a higher level of confidence going in.  Informational, I'm
not sure, but it would be a shame to have bad info in an Informational
doc.

Regarding 2): can Keld's mnemonic's be modified to accomodate the Viet-net
convention as a profile?  Should this be a requirement?  If it is just
technically impossible, this should be laid out plainly for the clueless.
Then we can decide if two incompatible schemes can coexist.

I'm not sure any mnemonic scheme can do much with 3).  If that's true,
and it's not a specific problem with Keld's proposal, we should decide
quickly if we can accept any mnemonic proposal at all.

4) requires that we know what Informational, Experimental and Proposed
mean.  Pointers to the document specifying these would be very helpful.

All this assumes that we're the right group to do this work.  Any chance
of consensus on at least this?

Jim

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