Keith,
Thanks for your message:
the problem as I see it is that Mr. Salsman has not been able to obtain
much community support, much less consensus, for his idea. I am
not so sure that it's a fundamentally bad idea, but perhaps it needs
tweaking in order to gain widespread support. Or perhaps it's just not
high enough on anyone's priority list except Mr. Salsman's. Regardless,
it needs a great deal more support than Mr. Salsman's to be approved, and
neither does such support seem to be forthcoming from the IETF list members.
I had been able to get the explicit support of about two dozen
generally respected and directly affected people before I
published this petition, on which they are listed:
http://www.bovik.org/devup-petition
After posing the issue as one of platform-independence (instead
of spoken language education as I had been) multiple hundreds of
people endorsed (and are still endorsing) on that petition.
Many of those people wrote to the www-html list last month, as
is recorded in the W3C archives for early March.
If there needs to be a formal proposal to the IETF, it should
not be submitted by me alone. Experience has shown that an
outspoken geek with no apparent interest is not taken as
seriously as would be, for example, the officers in charge of
teaching spoken languages to cadets at West Point, with their
immediate mission-critical interest with profound life-or-death
implications affecting communities throughout the world.
Cheers,
James