Sheesh!--next you'll be telling us that you never heard the phrase
"out of scope" before last week.
Sure I have. There's hardly a piece of work done by the IETF that someone
hasn't claimed to be out of scope. It's just that the phrase is not used
consistently. If we look at the historical facts about the work that the
IETF has traditionally taken on, it's hard to draw any conclusion other than
that anything is in scope which promotes and facilitates the use of the
Internet and of IP infrastructure. And I think that's exactly what the IETF
should be doing.
The example I'm thinking about involved predecessors to OpenGL.
As this example doesn't even involve communication over a network, I would
agree that it is out of scope. But that's a rather extreme case, most of
the contentious areas do involve communications over an IP infrastructure.
Often the brutal WG chairs say they don't think the WG knows enough, but
it's the scope arguments that carry the day.
I've never had much luck myself with scope arguments, unless they could be
backed up with an argument either that the center of expertise is elsewhere,
or that the topic has no bearing on IP. Of course, people will sometimes be
willing to agree that the center of expertise is elsewhere without
necessarily agreeing that they themselves aren't experts ;-) Sometimes scope
arguments are merely face-saving ways of saying "we don't know what we are
doing". Other times, scope arguments are merely "polite" ways of saying "we
don't think you know what you are doing". You almost never hear someone
saying "that sounds like a really good idea, but unfortunately it is out of
scope".