I must apologize for not following all of the latest technical comments on PEM.
I have been ignoring the "Re: Are we a standards committee?" messages assuming
that these were not relevant technical discussions. I now see that many valid
technical comments have been made in this misnamed thread.
I would like to modify this thread of discussion slightly. Are we an effective
standards committee?
My opinion is no.
There is much room to improve our working groups efficiency. I believe that
the mechanism instituted by Steve Kent
(justdoit(_at_)sub-rosa(_dot_)bbn(_dot_)com and
letswait(_at_)sub-rosa(_dot_)bbn(_dot_)com) provides a very valuable means to
improve our
standards development process. Rather than having a multitude of opinions
spewed into my electronic in box, this approach offers a means to review
collected coherent comments.
I plan to submit my opinions to "letswait(_at_)sub-rosa(_dot_)bbn(_dot_)com"
before the January
22 deadline. I have very little confidence in the current editing process for
PEM-MIME. I hope that the collection of comments in this (non-binding)
referendum will help resolve and correct the issues with the specification.
Paul