On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 4:52 PM, Henry Sinnreich
<henry(_dot_)sinnreich(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>wrote:
It is really hard to avoid this discussion, but one cannot let such
nonsense stand, especially in the IETF.
I have no idea which nonsense is being referred to of if it is actually
nonsense.
Remember the first law of the Internet: You are so not in charge (for all
values of 'you')
Web Services/Applications/Whatevers (WSAWs) are going to impact the
standards community through their sheer number and variety.
I expect the real problem we are going to see is people being turned away
from the standards process because there is just not time. People know the
costs/benefits of open network standards already.
Having deployed a successful proprietary protocol is already becoming a de
facto requirement for getting space in many standards organizations. Usually
the request is for either the IETF/W3C to take change control or for a
common protocol to be agreed from multiple deployed systems.
If we want to get a handle on this we need to look at the standards process
and make it easier to transition from proprietary to standard.
For example, every Web Service effort I have been in has had the same set of
arguments over use of XML, identifiers, SOAP etc. And every time we start
from scratch because we can't remember what the arguments were.
Another big problem in the Web Services world is discovery. The original
design for the SOAP scheme had UDDI as the central hub keeping the system
together. We lost that part because the design of UDDI started from the ever
popular 'we are going to replace the DNS'. Yeah, right, have fun with that.
In short, I think the IETF probably needs to forget being in the Web
Services Applications space completely, there is simply not the bandwidth
here and the structure of the IETF is just not set up to succeed there.
If I am designing a Web Service Application I am generally working with
10-100 people whose sole focus and interest is that one issue. They have
zero interest in a standards process where they will have F2F meetings three
times a year lasting one or two hours each. When we do that type of work we
want to meet for two days at a place convenient for that specific community
and work on the Web service we are working on and nothing else.
The IETF is set up for developing platforms and infrastructure, these
protocols are built on top of the platforms and infrastructure.
--
Website: http://hallambaker.com/
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