perhaps, as noted earlier, the turning point was when wg's were
chartered to do requirements documents instead of protocol
documents. perhaps the problem is even earlier...
in my experience, one reason that a WG is chartered to do only a requirements
document (there are others *) is that the WG appears to lack basic competence,
but there isn't the political will to entirely block creation of the group.
so the group is allowed to do a requirements document in the hope that doing so
will give the group more clue. sometimes it even works, but quite often the
group ends up creating an immensely complex mess.
so the chartering of groups to do requirements documents may be a symptom
of the problem rather than the problem itself. but it probably does correleate
in time with the "turning point".
Keith
* another reason is that the group's work needs to satisfy such a diverse set of
interests that the only way to get everyone on the same page is for the group
to jointly write such a document.
p.s. I wish we'd stop calling them requirements documents, because we tend
to treat them as if they were carved in stone rather than merely an exercise
in getting everyone to agree on a problem definition. "design goals" is much
better.