- From: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
- Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2002 20:51:38 -0400
- To: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- cc: Michael Mealling <michael@neonym.net>, Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>, www-tag@w3.org
> If the decision entails not using http: URIs for IANA > things, then I disagree with it. I consider myself > a member, i.e. a participant, in the IETF, and I'm > disappointment that the consensus process seems > to have failed. I'm interested to know > what sort of last calls and such I should have been paying > attention to in order to voice my disagrement before > the decision was made. I'm not aware of IETF having made any such decision. Actually I'm not aware of anyone having formally proposed such a thing. OTOH, I'm against having IANA assign URIs of any kind of existing IETF protocol elements, because I believe that (based on lots of experience with existing protocols borrowing one another's protocol elements) it's naive to pretend you can expect semantic equivalence for protocol elements independent of the context in which they are used, and I also believe that exporting elements of existing protocols to XML will degrade interoperabliity of those protocols. So if you're going to insist on consensus within IETF you should be aware IETF contains a broad spectrum of opinions on the topic. (my opinion seems to be in the minority, but hey, I tried...) > The answer to "things failing because the IANA > decided to re-arrange its website" is: don't do that. I'd strongly recommend against imposing any policy on IANA that tried to force them to maintain their existing directory structure. actually many of the current registration files are desparately in need of re-organization (some of this has been happening). and any programmer that wired-in current IANA URLs would have to be either hopelessly naive or delusional. if you want to make some small set of URLs reasonably persistent then you can probably do so - but to do this you need to organize those URLs from the start to maximize persistence, and you also need to commit resources to maintaining the service - training people how to do it, and committing the knowledge to institutional memory. that's a lot more difficult than most people think, especially when large numbers of people "think" they know how URLs work and feel free to rearrange them or reassign them on a whim. it's a social/educational problem more than a technical one, but it's still a hard problem. > In fact, promise not to do it... in an standards-track > RFC, if that's the sort of guarantee you trust. I can't imagine that we'd get consensus to impose that kind of constraint on IANA's operation. Keith
Received on Friday, 12 July 2002 20:51:58 UTC