Fixed font v multiple fonts

[todd glassey]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Seng" <jseng at pobox.org.sg>
To: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <pbaker at verisign.com>
Cc: <problem-statement at alvestrand.no>; "Keith Moore" <moore at cs.utk.edu>;
"'Lars-Erik Jonsson (LU/EAB)'" <lars-erik.jonsson at ericsson.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2003 11:24 PM
Subject: Re: Fixed font v multiple fonts


> Just have another thought, altho I may be over-generalizing...but bear
> with me for a moment.
>
> Some standard organisation achieve consensus by doing a UNION of the
> ideas, ie, if A propose X and B propose Y, so long there is no conflict,
> we put both X & Y into the standard.
>
> During voting, A dont object to Y if B dont object to X and vice versa
> (aka horse trading). The results is that it _is_ possible to achieve
> 100% consensus altho we have a bloated standard.
>
> IETF on the other hands prefers to do INTERSECTION of the ideas, ie, if
> A propose X and B propose Y, we take only the intersection of the ideas
> where there "rough consensus" and throw out those (from X or Y) that
> have does not have rough consensus.

The problem is that this intersection becomes the one and only possiblity
from that WG and that is where the restraint of trade and possibly antitrust
type effects come into the play. A standard is critical for business
development, as evidenced by the funding of the IETF and the standards
process by  people like Cisco and MCI/WordCom, who  would not spend what
they spend on developing protocols in this arena... if there were no BizDev
value.

The problem is that for some of those that participate that this effort went
into developing their own wares whcih was totally cool, the problem is that
the otherside is true as well,  that the same development process also
supresses any other competeitve efforts.

If you doubt this then look to the standards track documents and answer the
following questions:

    1)     How is a compentitve standards vetted and where?
    2)    How does a competitive standard challange and retire another
standard?

    becuase if its in the same WG and the original standard's owners (and I
am not referring to the IETF here) are not interested in letting userp their
effort, then there is NO POSSIBLE WAY to get any competitve standard through
the IETF or into standardship. I am sorry, I have done the work-flow and
there is just no possible way in reality to unseat any incumbant standard no
matter what the really high level ideal states in the controlling documents.


>
> While this remove horse trading problem and gives us a leaner standards,
> it also means we have to live with only very baseline standards, and in
> some cases, everyone equally pissed too (aka distribution of pain).

No - what it means is that the company for organization funding the most
number of voices in any WG wins, and does so  always... period. There is
nothing left to say here but if you or anyone else can prove otherwise, then
please do...

>
> Which is comes back to the topic of "ASCII text" vs "other fancy
> document format". At this moment, we have rough consensus that ASCII
> text, with its limitation, is useful for the IETF. OTOH, there is no
> rough consensus for any other document format yet. (notice we doing
> INTERSECTION of ideas).

No it doesnt. The issues of ASCII text only only serve today to make it
harder to participate and any person would agree to that.

The world has not stood still and is now to much more visual systems than
straight ASCII terminals and refusing to acknowledge that makes it harder
for the average person to participate in the IETF's processes, and I put it
to you that this is an intentional thing these days. In the beginning it
(ASCII only) made sense as the greatest-common-denominator but not anymore,
but this specific tact is used by any number of people to control how
difficult to create and file a document it is.

>
> Should we also allow other document format? If no, why not? (And in
> certain ways, people have absolute reasons to be angry). But if yes, are
> we ready to change the way we do this?
>
> Or a higher level question: Is the current way we process ideas, ie,
> taking only the parts which have rough consensus and leaving out those
> that dont have, a problem?

James - the consensus issues are a fundamental structural problem with the
WG's and the Standards Process. I have pointed out other scatter-effects
from the same 'methods' and their implementation above... in closing here,
its important to note that theses are totally separate issues from the "how
documents are presented" or filing requirements therein.


>
> -James Seng
>
> Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
>
> >>Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
> >>
> >>>Lars does not have the right to impose his decision on me.
> >
> >
> > Lars is free to present his work as shoddily as he chooses. He is not
free
> > to impose his choices on me.
> >
> >
>