Cross-Area Review (was: Fwd: RE: A follow up question on ietf@ietf.org)

[Keith Moore]

>  I've seen a number of postings that are coming
> close to saying "we approved IPv6 site locals as part of a
> proposed standard in RFC 1884, and again in RFC 2373, and again
> in RFC 3515, without enough application community review to
> shake out the issues we're shaking out now on the IETF
> discussion list".
...

> But I am curious what the lesson might be, for those of us
> thinking about the problems with IETF standards process.

well, rather than extrapolating from one data point, maybe we should consider
some other snafus also.

I'd argue that IPsec largely missed the boat by sticking to a view that hosts,
and in particular IP addreses, were generally appropriate to use as security
principals.  As a result applications still don't use it today.

lots of work has been invested in service location stuff which for some reason
has never resulted in much use.

URNs (one of my pet projects) don't seem to have been as useful as
anticipated.

The zeroconf work has produced multiple disasters, including both v4 linklocal
addressing and LLMNR (which was spun off to the DNS folks but still suffers
from flawed assumptions IMHO).

--

one kind of problem seems to occur when there is a long delay between the time
that the fundamental design decisions are made and the time that they actually
start to get used.  a tighter feedback loop between specification authors and
early adopters might help.