Re: draft-ietf-impp-cpim-msgfmt syntax

Adam,


Monday, November 11, 2002, 3:47:53 PM, you wrote:
Adam>  "Like it or not, people implement I-Ds, especially ones that
Adam>   have been around for as long as CPIM-MSGFMT and PIDF.

"Most people" do not.

And after hearing 13 years of hearing the "installed base" argument against
making reasonable changes to an I-D, no it does not carry much weight. I
really enjoyed when it was done for PEM, roughly 10 years ago.

By the way, perhaps you missed the description of what an I-D is supposed to
be? For example "Internet-Drafts are not an archival document series. These
documents should not be cited or quoted in any formal document."   Proposed
Standard RFCs are subject to the sort of change resistance you cite.  Not
I-Ds.


Adam> You've admitted that your issue is not technical per se ("There
Adam> is nothing wrong with the current spec, from a computer science
Adam> standpoint"), but practical. However, when a practical rebuttal

Forgive me.  I missed the "practical" rebuttal.

All I have heard so far is "we discussed this a long time ago" and "some
people have implemented the I-D". Neither of those has to do with the
adoption and interoperability concerns that I raised.


Adam> To rephrase what Jonathan said: standards work suffers pretty
Adam> serious multiplier effects.  Small bits of writing cause large
Adam> amounts of programming;

Gee.  I thought *I* wrote that.

In fact, I thought that was why I originally posted the suggestion that we
not invent a new parser.


d/
-- 
 Dave Crocker  <mailto:[email protected]>
 TribalWise <http://www.tribalwise.com>
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