From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Sun Sep 01 2002 - 10:27:52 CDT
Clive D W Feather <clive@demon.net> writes:
> Russ Allbery said:
>> If this had been done when this working group was first started, that RFC
>> would have already been published and we would be well into working on new
>> work, probably much farther along than we are now.
> FX: falls over laughing.
> See son-of-1036 for details.
Son-of moves towards a strict standardization of existing practice, but
wasn't entirely (and even admits to that in the introduction). It had
some of the same problems that our draft has, but to a much lesser degree.
See, for example, the proposed MIME-encoding of Newsgroups headers, which
regardless of one's opinion on the proposal as an idea, is not existing
practice.
(It also suffers from the problem of trying to be a repository of common
wisdom about implementation as well as a standard, something else that our
draft suffers from, except our draft is less coherent.)
But I'm inclined to think that more of the reason why Son-of was never
published was because it lacked enough people to push it through the
standards process. This is hard to do, regardless of the merits of the
document.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>