Consensus Call Tranche 1 (Document Organization)

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 04:54:52PM -0400, Vint Cerf wrote:
> DUE DATE: October 10, 2008 (ET)
>
Place your reply here: [NO]
>
> COMMENTS:

> (1.a) The Rationale document should be retained to support implementors 
> whose work requires that they understand the reasoning behind certain 
> design choices.

Even if I think this is true,

> (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.

I don't think this is true.  I cannot see any reason why a rationale
document ought to become a normative part of a specification.  In
another context, I am fighting to fix historical documents which
conflated the informative and normative roles, and which did so in an
environment of much greater homogeneity than we find among the network
operator community today.  

As an aside, I agree that there are two audiences for these documents.
We can call them, loosely, the "registry implementers" and the
"protocol implementers".  The latter are the strictly technical people
who will have to implement the protocol as such.  The former are,
often, technical managers who do not have or need the technical savvy
to implement (or maybe understand) the protocol as such, but who have
to make intelligent and informed choices about the policies related to
the protocol.  It seems to me that these two audiences have enough
different about them that we need to address them differently.  A
protocol implementer rarely cares why: "what" is the correct question
here, or we'll never get interoperation.  Policy decisions, however,
need to be informed more by why than by what. 

> 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)

I agree strongly with others in the thread, who have argued that if
there is such controversy, then there is no way the documents are
ready to go anywhere.  If we who are interested in this topic cannot
agree on what is normative, I can't see how interoperation is ever
going to happen.  If you can't state something plainly, it's not a
protocol for machines.  So to the extent these things aren't yet
plain, we don't have protocol documents yet.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
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