If we are putting a "Request For Comments" on a "standards track" as
a "proposed standard," what else are we doing other than acting as
a standards committee? I must be missing an important piece of
IETF politics, or else I'm just naive.
Well, I'm sure that some others here can give better answers, but here's my
perspective as someone who's been involved with both other standards processes
and the IETF. There are several aspects to the distinction I see:
(1) The IETF has no enforcement power. If you violate an Internet standard,
the only enforcement is peer pressure or ridicule.
(2) Internet standards efforts are descriptive, not prescriptive. Rather
than describe an ideal implementation before anything is built, they
are supposed to describe demonstrated working solutions, the best of
which are endorsed as part of the standards track. Sometimes these
are then endorsed by other standards bodies, but this is a separate
process.
(3) There is no formal voting or representation process, in part to encourage
the emphasis of implementation over politics.
(4) In theory, working code takes precedence over theoretical concerns.
There is a reason that SMTP & MIME succeeded on the Internet and X.400 did
not, even though X.400 is in many respects technically superior. But X.400
implementations generally lag at least 4 years behind approval of the
standards. If that's what we want to emulate, we should just use it. The
latest revs of X.400 and X.500 are quite technically impressive and complete.
I just don't expect to be able to buy implementations before the turn of the
millenium, and we don't have the sheer engineering resources necessary to
implement them ourselves.
Just to give some perspective, I used to be an X.400 proponent, because in
1991 it was far ahead of SMTP+MIME in a technical sense. Then I tried to find
an X.400(1988) implementation. I understand that there finally are one or
two, now that 1988 has been in turn superceded.