Consensus Call Tranche 1 (Document Organization)

Simon Josefsson simon at josefsson.org
Tue Oct 7 19:55:46 CEST 2008


Vint Cerf <vint at google.com> writes:

> DUE DATE: October 10, 2008 (ET)
>
> Place your reply here: [YES or NO]

NO.

> COMMENTS:

Speaking as implementer, it is difficult to implement technology that is
not clearly specified, and even more so when it is unclear what is
intended to be normative and what is not.  Having normative language
spread over several documents is unfortunate, but if there is a clear
separation (like in IDNA2003), the costs are manageable.  Having
normative language in a rationale document does not seem like a good
idea to me.

I would agree that definitions needs to be normative.  However, that is
not a reason to make the entire idnabis-rationale document normative.
It is easy to reproduce the necessary definitions in the other document.

> The alternative is:
>
> - The normative material should be removed from Rationale and
> extracted to a separate document (for example Terms and Concepts)

This sounds better from a technical point of view to me.

> even if this lengthens the WG's target dates for an unknown period of
> time.  Note that there may be controversy about what material is
> normative and what is not; that is a separate consensus issue and may
> also take an unknown period of time to resolve   (R.2)

If there are controversies around what is normative and what is not,
that suggests to me that the documents aren't ready to move forward
anyway.

/Simon


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