Protocol-05

[John C Klensin]

Mark,

I am not moving any definitional or equivalent text out of
rationale until I see the results of consensus calls on the
matter, if only because I don't want to be moving things back
and forth.

Difficulties for the editor have never been the issue here, at
least as far as I'm concerned.  There are two concerns:

	(i) The odds of making a mistake in the "moving" process
	that would leave us with loose ends.
	
	(ii) The observation that there is a valid and
	significant audience for the material in Rationale whom
	we will never persuade to read Protocol.  If the
	definitions are not readily available to them without
	reading Protocol, it is almost certain that they will
	interpret the terminology in Rationale as meaning
	whatever they think the words mean... and that will get
	them, and the Internet, into trouble.  

A few people have suggested that a middle-ground solution to the
latter problem would be to move the normative material from
Rationale into a separate document, so that the implementer/
technologist class of reader would look at 
   Definitions / Protocol/ Tables (and Bidi if it isn't folded
into Protocol) plus Rationale if it is of interest.

and the other classes of readers would look at 
   Definitions/ Rationale

I hope that option is considered when the consensus calls are
issued.

I'll try to respond to your other suggestions late in the week.

     john

--On Monday, 29 September, 2008 15:53 +0200 Mark Davis
<mark at macchiato.com> wrote:

> I had a chance to review the documents again, and here are my
> comments.
> 
> 1. First, and most importantly, the normative definitions
> really have to be moved out of the rationale document and into
> the protocol document. One could argue that disentangling them
> is difficult for the editor, but as it stands the documents
> are simply too difficult to understand in terms of the
> normative implications. And if it is difficult for the editor
> to disentangle, it will be far, far, more difficult for users
> of the specifications to disentangle.
> 
> Concretely, I suggest that this would be done by moving the
> following sections into the protocol document.
> 
> 1.5.2 - 1.5.4
> 4
> 5, 5.1, 5.2
> 9.1
> 
> Most of the above moves into the terminology section in
> protocol; 9.1 (describing differences from IDNA2003) could
> come either near the start or at the end.