At 8:39 PM +0100 5/23/06, Sylvain Hellegouarch wrote:
At the end of the day, the marketplace will work within the
constraints of what 4287 allows; my feeling is that there are going
to be a ton of extensions that will attach unforeseen metadata at
arbitrary points with Atom documents, and implementations that fail
to store these and make them retrievable will quickly be seen as
broken. -Tim
Sounds about right. Where do we stop then? If the marketplace
decides, is there a need to submit the FTE to the IETF? Will any
extensions need to be submitted? Only Atom per see needed to be
standardised in such a case.
Welcome to the messy world of standards. There might be a need for an
updated FTE RFC. On the other hand, if the market gives a big yawn,
there is probably no need to update the RFC if no one is using it. On
the third hand, it doesn't hurt to have it updated anyway; there are
lots of RFCs that have barely any implementations. There is probably
a fourth hand consideration as well.
There is no clear delineation point for when an extension should
become an RFC. The IETF plays it by ear. For some protocols, lots of
extensions as RFCs has been a boon; for others, just a bother. We
won't know where the Atom format fits in that range for a few years.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium
