Hi John, At 18:34 03-06-2012, John C Klensin wrote:
I don't think that is a fair comparison. First of all, the Last Call spawned the whole thread about colloquial language. I don't have any way to know how many of those who participated in that thread read all the way through the document and even less way to guess how many people were enough turned off by it to lose interest in the Last Call, maybe after having read the document. Second and more important, my suggestion that we go
Fair enough. My guess was that the Last Call was not really a Last Call. :-)
in the direction of a web page or wiki spawned a separate thread that is more about the philosophy of how to handle the document rather than about the detailed content of the document itself. Again, I have no idea how many people other than myself looked through the document, decided that "publish as RFC?" was the wrong question, and as the result of that decision, concluded that my time was better spent on medium and editorial process than on reporting specific document comments. So you don't know to what extent I, or anyone else in the "making it a web page" threads read the document through either.
Yes. At 18:14 03-06-2012, John C Klensin wrote:
Well, as long as the document is informational and an overview, I think that can be accomplished as easily with a web page, an editor who can be trusted to exercise a certain amount of good sense (and whose intentions are trusted) and a process for forcing a review if needed. The thing that bothers me about trying to do this by RFC is that the entire community then wastes a huge amount of time debating the choice and style of words and relatively minor details, after which everyone runs out of energy to make further changes for years (other than posting I-Ds on which there are no real controls, even an appeal process (not that I'd expect Paul to ignore input)). If we go the web page and editor route, expect revisions only when real problems are identified and otherwise do a review every year or so, I think we can get a pretty good balance between the slowness of the RFC-and-community-consensus process and the difficulties of the Wiki one.
In 1994 it was mentioned that due to the nature of the document it can become outdated quite quickly. The web page approach was recommended. The EDU Team ( http://wiki.tools.ietf.org/group/edu/wiki/EduCharter ) could be an alternative to take on the task.
Regards, -sm
