From: owner-spf-discuss(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com
[mailto:owner-spf-discuss(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com] On Behalf Of wayne
In my opinion, it doesn't make any difference what format the
new SPF RR will be as it will never be widely used. In this
case, I completely agree with Phillip Hallam-Baker, Harry
Katz, and Jim Lyon.
Back in 1992 when Tim started to think the Web might go somewhere he started
to collect a group of people with network, security etc. expertise to
improve the design.
In retrospect I now believe that we were largely wasting our time from 1995
on and probably earlier. The keepalive extension to HTTP was useful but that
was proposed in 1993. The caching stuff might as well not been bothered with
for all the good it did. By the time it was deployed the most visited parts
of the Web had pages being built dynamically.
HTML improved a great deal of course but that process was largely a matter
of filling out the spec to a full document format and the market rejected
many of the most important extensions - math markup for example.
Accepting that something is out of our control is the hardest thing to do.
Unless you do that though you can never do the next thing, which is almost
certainly more important for you. Anyone can be lucky once. To prove that it
was not just an accident you have to do the next thing.
I think that it is probably a good thing that at the moment Cisco and Yahoo
have not announced a single consensus standard. Once that happens we will
lose the opportunity to make useful changes. It is not often that Phill
suggests taking things slow but I think that six months delay may allow us
to deliver a much better crypto spec than we have today because we can take
advantage of the early deployment experience.
But at this point it is clear that the crypto approach is also becoming
inevitable. Which is why you should all stop obsessing about IPR arround the
PRA. If the rights to the PRA were enforced in an unfriendly manner the only
effect would be a transition to the crypto scheme. Ergo the rights will not
be enforced.
If you end up in a discussion with lawyers you have already lost.
Phill