Brian - you've hit on an important point here. It strikes me that the
process for defining our own document standards has no fundamental
differences from the process for defining any other standard. Why shouldn't
this archival document standard be developed and adopted as a Standard in
the same way?
I've explicitly refrained from contributing any observations from my 15
years of experiences working with IETF docs in vi, emacs, nroff, Word,
LaTeX, PDF, ASCII-art diagrams, XML2RFC, dot-matrix printers, etc., as well
as experience with Word in CableLabs/DOCSIS specs - because those
contributions would not be part of an engineering process like the one you
describe, and would be simply more hot air if posted outside of a process.
Well, one might say, haven't we tried the IETF process on the archival
document format problem in the past? And the document format hasn't
changed. Yup, and there are a couple of (not necessarily mutually
exclusive) conclusions we might draw:
* the current format is the best solution we can devise for our requirements
* the IETF engineering process is flawed
- Ralph
On 1/5/06 7:35 AM, "Brian E Carpenter" <brc(_at_)zurich(_dot_)ibm(_dot_)com>
wrote:
Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
--On mandag, januar 02, 2006 18:10:15 +0200 Yaakov Stein
<yaakov_s(_at_)rad(_dot_)com> wrote:
The only thing I am sure about is
that
consensus on this list is for keeping everything exactly as it is.
I'm pretty sure there's no such consensus.
I do, however, see a rather strong consensus-of-the-speakers against
using MS-Word document format for anything "official".
I think we need to tackle this whole issue, if we do decide to
tackle it, in a much more systematic way.
- what are our functional requirements?
- which of them are not met today?
- what are the possible solutions, and what is their practical
and operational cost?
- which, if any, solutions should we adopt, on what timescale?
I believe that if we took a systematic approach like that, the issue
of how we determine consensus would be broken into enough small
steps that it really wouldn't be an issue.
Brian
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf