Proposed document structure and content for IDNA

Paul Hoffman phoffman at imc.org
Thu Jul 10 20:24:03 CEST 2008


At 12:09 PM -0600 7/10/08, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>Will the commentary/history/rationale go into an informational 
>document of some kind, or will that back story be lost in the 
>process?

My preference would be the latter. The "back story" is quite 
different depending on who you talk to. The folks who did the heavy 
lifting to write the first drafts have different rationale and 
history from those who are doing the current reviews.

One example that was brought out at the Philly meeting by a few 
people is the wide disagreement about how much IDNA2008 was "needed". 
There are similar disagreements for almost every revision to major 
IETF protocols. (I'm still living with the aftermath of IKEv2, for 
example.) I'm quite skeptical that we could get WG consensus on much 
of the rationale, or even the commentary.

The WG mailing list archives will, of course, live forever. That 
should be sufficient for any implementer who really needed to 
understand why the WG agreed to some particular part of the spec.


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