Actually, a couple people have pointed out in email that with the IAB/JTC1
argeement, the IAB/IETF really is a recognized standards body, with all of
legal and procedural requirements that come with that status. So, in
general, I stand corrected on my statement that we're not a standards
committee. It seems we are after all, so I guess I shouldn't complain that
this is reminding me of them :).
That being said, I have some responses to Dave:
Ultimately, standards are specs. Ultimately, that's what we
produce. You are quite correct about a feature that makes the IETF
approach rather distinctive and have a better-than-average success rate,
but ultimately, our product is a document, just like all the other guys.
This is fair. By my contrast of prescriptive vs. descriptive, though, I
was trying to contrast "if we this, it will work" to "we did this, and
this is what we found out." I much prefer the latter, in general.
but I won't let that stop me from commenting: I'd say that your assessment
might be credible if X.400 and Mime had hit the streets at the same time.
Given that X.400 had a 10 year head start, and had no competition, I'd
guess other factors might be responsible, such as X.400's complexity and
the poor specification continuity (protection of the installed base) from
the 84 to 88 to 92 specifications, for example.
Oh, no question. I think these are things that could have been avoided if
anyone had bothered to try and build an X.400 system before they specified
it, though, instead of assuming in advance that they knew the problem domains.
This is the kind of trap I think we are in danger of falling into if we're
not careful.
Bottom line: The IETF is a standards body. The pem-dev working group is a
standards group working on messaging authentication & privacy (and maybe
one or two other security issues.)
Given this definition (which I accept perfectly amicably given some data I
didn't have yesterday :)), what are our stated goals (and, if possible,
what are explicitly *not* our goals)? The charter in the WG description
file on ds.internic.net simply describes RFCs 1421-1423, rather than listing
goals. Is there another document that describes our current focus?
Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation