On Tue, 11 Dec 2007, Iain Calder wrote:
Protocols *can* get pushed aside by challengers that aren't their
descendants. For example, suppose a completely different protocol
called IEP (Internet Email Protocol) arises in the future and, due to
its vastly superior characteristics, becomes the dominant mail transport
system. SMTP would then become historic and IEP would need to be marked
as the current standard. Under these circumstances, an IETF-SMTP label
proves a poor choice. The usefulness of the STD-10 label, however, is
unaffected.
This has already happened in at least two cases. Telnet and rsh have
largely been displaced by ssh, and FTP and Gopher by HTTP. I'm not sure
that it's useful to have a formal numeric label for remote login, or file
transfer, or email, when we have perfectly adequate generic terminology.
I'm not even sure the IETF should make a de jure choice between
competitors, especially when it's likely to be embarrassingly different
from the market's de facto choice. That, too, has already happened, to the
OSI protocols.
Tony.
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