On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 12:27 PM, Peter Saint-Andre
<stpeter(_at_)stpeter(_dot_)im> wrote:
I think that if some people support the idea, they can easily create a
wiki somewhere (e.g., "specsannotated.com") and get to work. If the
experiment has value, we'll figure that out. If not, well, it was just
an experiment.
I agree.
I was invited to this discussion by Yaron because I'm the creator of
annocpan.org.
First, let me say that I have been pleasantly surprised by the
constructive behavior of annocpan contributors. There has been very
little spam, very little fighting, and very little verbosity (while
there is no strict limit on the size of the notes that people can
post, the "sticky note" metaphor encourages brevity and facts instead
of discourse).
Perhaps the lack of spam and fighting in annocpan is because the
traffic is modest, or due to the non-contentious nature of the
documents that are being annotated. Each page is just the
documentation for a freely available Perl module, take it or leave it,
and is not the documentation for a protocol that people are expected
to follow. It is possible that an annotated RFC would prove more
contentious and noisy, but perhaps not. One way to find out is to try.
Someone asked about the possibility of reusing the annocpan code. It
is of course freely available and written in Perl, but I'm afraid it
might be hard to disentangle from all the assumptions it makes about
the way the (CPAN) documents are organized. But if anyone wants to try
and has any questions, feel free to drop me a line.
When I started annocpan it was as a completely "unofficial" site,
whatever that means in the Perl world (although I did manage to obtain
a grant from the Perl Foundation for support and encouragement). I did
it because I thought it cold be useful, with very little discussion
with the "authorities". Later, when a few other people were convinced
that it could be useful, I got it to look a little bit more "official"
by, for example, getting links to annocpan from search.cpan.org, which
is the de facto "official" CPAN search site.
I do think that annotated RFCs could be useful. You just need to make
sure that it is clear that the annotations are unofficial additions
and that the underlying RFC is the ruling document.
However, my philosophy is that these types of projects are best
started as bottom-up experiments. It is somewhat embarrassing when a
big or respected organization tries to join some bandwagon by building
an official [wiki|social networking site|forum|etc] and it fails. If
one or more lonely experimenters fail, no one notices. But if they
succeed, then they can be embraced by the organization with a product
that is already useful and running. Plus, when you, the experimenter,
start the experiment it is much more efficient to be able to be a
"benevolent dictator" over your experiment, instead of having to
discuss things over and over (be especially wary of "color of the
bikeshed" types of discussions.)
Hope this helps,
Ivan
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf