At 11:03 PM 7/3/2001, James P. Salsman wrote:
I hope that the latest attempt at the OPES charter is resoundingly
rejected by the IESG.
The key task statement in the opening paragraph of the draft proposal is:
"define application-level protocols enabling such intermediaries
to incorporate services that operate on messages transported by HTTP and
RTP/RTSP."
"Incorporate services" is vague. Or rather, it says nothing useful. The
opening paragraph of a charter is to be widely distributed, to help people
decide what a working group is doing and whether it is relevant to one's
own work.
The current proposal language is frankly a Rorschach for anyone with any
HTTP-related activity that might involve an intermediary.
Later language in the draft do not assuage this fear:
"protocols to be defined provide a framework for integrating a
wide range of services".
Specifics (or even examples) are not provided.
Honest. In spite of considerable experience writing and reading IETF
charters, I can not tell what problem is to be solved, never mind how.
d/
Addendum #1:
Either as an minor irritation, or as a major demonstration of
deception -- and I can't quite decide which -- the iCAP web page
<http://www.i-cap.org/> uses the IETF logo in a fashion that can easily be
taken to imply IETF endorsement for
<http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-elson-opes-icap-01.txt>.
Addendum #2:
Isn't an implied promise to integrate HTTP and RTP/RTSP rather
ambitious?
----------
Dave Crocker <mailto:dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com>
tel +1.408.246.8253; fax +1.408.273.6464