Steve Kent <kent(_at_)bbn(_dot_)com> writes:
Finally, to be quite blunt, one IAB member and two IESG members have
told me over the last few weeks (without solicitation) that they view
the spec in question as very bad. The term "shit" was used by at
least one of these folks. I take this sort of concern, espressed
by experienced, knowledgable people, very seriously.
Well, gosh. Were they more specific? Are they willing to make their
criticisms public to the working group? I would certainly hope so--if they
aren't, then there is more political mire involved than even I would have
expected, and we should just hang it up now. I am willing to take their
concerns seriously if they are willing to make them public, but I have no
patience for anonymous (and worse, unspecified) criticism of a public
document.
I have so far seen no proposals regarding what we should be doing instead of
the current proposal, except for the suggestions to drop key selectors and use
the public key or a digest of it instead (a suggestion which I support).
If the spec is indeed as bad as you and your unnamed IAB & IESG members seem
to believe it is, then please describe to us what we should do. Merely
shooting down other peoples' work gets us nowhere, as can be seen in *copious*
detail by reading through the archives of this working group over the past
couple of years. It's amazing we have a proposal at all, to be blunt.
If, after years of work, this working group cannot come up with an acceptable
way to allow PEM to coexist with MIME, then in my opinion it should be
dissolved, and let the marketplace figure it out. According to the charter of
the WG, it has no goals (the description of the WG is in fact a description of
PEM itself, not a working group). If we have no goals, cannot agree on the
problems we are trying to solve, or the ways to solve them, then there is no
reason to continue.
RFC 1421 ff. are sufficient for non-MIME environments--no one disputes this,
to my knowledge. If we're not going to go any further, doesn't that mean that
we're done?
Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation