Extensibility methods in APPCORE protocol

At the APPCORE meeting in Minneapolis, it was said that APPCORE should
not contain any building block which is not used in two existing
IETF standard.

This might be a good rule, but on one particular point, I think the
rule should not be taken too litterally. That particular point is
methods of making it easier to extend a standard in the future.
IETF standards have traditionally been very bad in this area,
and this has caused unneccesary ugly methods of making extensions
so as not to break existing software. I think it would be very
important if APPCORE contained good methods for specifying standards
so that they can easily be extended. This should include some kind
of support for marking future extensions as critical or non-critical.
(An agent which receives a criticial extension, which it cannot
handle, must reject the protocol unit, while an agent which receives
a non-criticial extension, which it cannot handle, can ignore it
or forward it transparently without understanding it.)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme

Received on Wednesday, 17 March 1999 08:27:46 UTC