Keith Moore writes:
If people don't want their proposals reviewed by the community because
they are afraid that their ideas won't find favor, I have no sympathy
with them.
Let's try an example.
Mail-Followup-To has found favor with the community. It saves time for
users. There are several independent interoperable implementations.
In the IETF, however, publication of an experimental Mail-Followup-To
spec was blocked by a small group of people who refuse to admit that
mail clients have separate reply and followup features. Presumably the
same people would also be in charge of an IETF field-name registry.
There are several problems here:
* The IETF ``leadership'' does a poor job of representing the
community. IETF doesn't have mechanisms for the community to
override decisions made by people like Keith.
* Control is being applied prematurely. Keith doesn't want to allow
an experiment and then make an informed decision; he wants to kill
the experiment before it happens.
* IETF review is painfully slow; it certainly doesn't happen on
``Internet time.'' Consider, again, the case of Internet
telephones, where IETF _still_ hasn't finished SIP.
Am I saying that Mail-Followup-To should be standardized without review?
No. I'm simply saying that the name should be reserved, so that there's
no risk of the Mail-Followup-To deployment bumping into something else.
---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago