Consensus Call Tranche 1 (Document Organization)

[John C Klensin]

--On Monday, 06 October, 2008 16:54 -0400 Vint Cerf
<vint at google.com> wrote:

> DUE DATE: October 10, 2008 (ET)
 
Place your reply here: YES

> COMMENTS: 

As I have said before, I can live with the extra document
solution implied by the alternative outlined below.    However,
I am very concerned about two things:

	(1) Especially given the speed at which the WG is
	moving, it may take us a long time to get consensus
	about what is and is not "normative".  One specific
	example is the description of differences between
	IDNA2003 and IDNA2003, which I believe must not be
	considered normative unless we want to risk much greater
	trouble.
	
	(2) I fear that, if we move the material that people
	consider critical out of the Rationale document with the
	intention of getting the other documents out sooner, it
	may be equivalent to a decision to kill the Rationale
	document.  For reasons that have been discussed at
	length on the list, I believe the explanatory material
	in the Rationale document is as important to our work as
	the protocol-implementer material in the other documents.

Both of those issues are addressed at more length in the note I
just sent in response to Jefsey's answer.  They may be further
elaborated in some more material I hope to get out within the
next 24 hours.

> Procedure:
>...
> This group needs to get its documents out; it is behind its
> original schedule. It should be noted that the IDN ccTLD and
> gTLD selection initiatives at ICANN have already begun so that
> delay may weaken the IETF's ability to assist in a rational
> deployment of IDNA.
> 
> 
> (1) Document organization
> 
> 
> (1.a) The Rationale document should be retained to support
> implementors whose work requires that they understand the
> reasoning behind certain design choices.  The philosophy of
> IDNA2008 relies strongly on the ability of registries
> (especially those of top-level domains) to properly constrain
> the choice of labels even if they are composed of characters
> that are protocol valid.  (R.1)
> 
> (1.b) While there has been debate about whether or not the
> content of the Rationale document should contain normative
> material, it seems expedient to agree on the content of
> Rationale for Proposed Standard without attempting to separate
> it into multiple parts. Therefore, it appears that the WG
> consensus is that: The normative material (definitions) should
> be retained in Rationale.
> 
> A YES means you concur with the consensus statements above.
> 
> The alternative is:
> 
> - The normative material should be removed from Rationale and
> extracted to a separate document (for example Terms and
> Concepts) 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)
>...