From: Eric Rosen <erosen(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com>
That is wrong or at least a gross overstatement.
If that's what you think, I invite you to make a list of all the
IETF-standardized protocols and explain how they are all (or even more than
50% of them) needed to make the Internet work.
There's a progression here:
1. ad hoc network interoperability group forms.
2. it has some success and gains some fame.
3. it is besieged by people eager to borrow its printing press
4. it is besieged by people who know everything about everything and
have a duty to write or at least control all standards on
everything including what people perversions do in the privacy
of their own networks.
I've been complaining about #3 for many years. Examples of #4 include
some of the more vigorous combatants in the IPv6 site local arena
and the notion that notion that nothing is out of scope.
There have been many things that the IETF has chosen to step away from but
that ran and run over the Internet. Some graphics standards come
immediately to my mind ... Those graphics standards were kept out of the
IETF not because the working groups involved thought they didn't think
they were experts, but because the subject was out of scope for the IETF."
I'm not familiar with this particular case, but I don't see why protocols
for distributing graphics would be thought to fall outside the scope of the
IETF, any more than protocols for distributing voice or video. Of course,
graphics standards that have nothing do with distribution of the graphics
over IP would be out of scope.
The example I'm thinking about involved predecessors to OpenGL.
People who know about network stuff know enough to stuff bits into
wires, but that's the earier part of things like OpenGL, Microsoft's
alternative whose name eludes me, JPEG, MPEG, and so forth.
No committee is ever able to limit itself on grounds of insufficient
expertise.
Now, there is a gross overstatement! For everyone who proclaims himself
(rightly or wrongly) to be an expert on some topic, there are always two
other people who claim that he is clueless.
The other two base their claims on their own greater expertise and
wouldn't dream of suggesting that they are not well suited for
standardizing whatever it is.
It's not uncommon for a WG to
refuse to pick up a topic because the consensus is that the topic's
proponents are clueless.
Please name an example of such a case. I have seen WG chairs and
others use brute force and out-of-scope arguments to halt nonsense,
but I've never seen "we don't know enough" work. Often the brutal WG
chairs say they don't think the WG knows enough, but it's the scope
arguments that carry the day.
Sheesh!--next you'll be telling us that you never heard the phrase
"out of scope" before last week.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com