Re: [dispatch] [Sedate] WG Review: Serialising Extended Data About Times and Events (sedate)

[[e-mail]]

> On Wed, Jun 2, 2021, at 02:43, [e-mail] <mailto:ned%2Bdispatch%40mrochek.com> wrote:
> > The main problem is that the charter specifies that a variant of RFC 3339 is to
> > be embedded in this new specification, with no consideration given to the
> > alternate approach of incorporating either RFC 3339 or an RFC 3339bis by
> > reference.

> I take a lot of responsibility for this - and it's this way *because* of the
> feedback in DISPATCH last time, which was "don't try messing with RFC3339".  But
> I think maybe you also looked at the draft as it was proposed back then because
> - again - I didn't push hard enough to have an actual draft uploaded which
> specified basically that this would look something like:

I looked at the draft that cited in the charter as being, and I quote, "A good
basis for this work." Nothing more, nothing less.

What you are now saying is that wasn't true. And more generally, you asked
people to spend time reviewing an obsolete version of the proposed work.

This is a good time to point out that the IETF depends on large amounts or work
being undertaken by volunteers, corporate sponsored at best, but in many cases,
aside from an occasional mention in an acknowledgements section, entirely
uncompensated. 

There has been a lot of talk recently about how to make the IETF more welcoming
to newcomers, as well as how to retain people after the work that attracted them
to the IETF is finished. 

I'm afraid I can think of few things more disheartening than a demonstrable lack
of concern for wasting people's time. Indeed, in a curious way it's more
disrespectful than a direct personal attack, since at least when someone attacks
you it's clear that they care about whatever it is you said or did.

In any case, in the future, when you propose a charter, please try and make sure
it accurately represents the work you want to do.

> "RFC3339{bis}-point-in-time{extended context}" (exact encoding TBD)

> And that we wouldn't mess with 3339 OR we would BIS 3339 for the first part,
> and produce another document which referenced RFC3339 or RFC3339bis as the
> definition for the point-in-time part.

> This is how I understand the goals of this intended group to be - and if
> that's not adequately represented in the proposed charter text then I would
> welcome clarifying edits!

We are way past this being a matter that can be resolved by a few edits.

First, the current charter proposal needs to be withdrawn. You then need to
produce two drafts:

(1) RFC 3339bis 
(2) Extended context

You then may want to get some preliminary review of these documents, to make
sure they track with your intended goals. Or not - it may be that the people
working on these specifications have a clear shared understanding of what's
needed.

Once this is done a new charter needs to be submitted that describes the work to
be done, with these two new drafts as a starting point. Given the wide use of
RFC 3339, it needs to be very specific about what is or isn't in scope for the
revision of that specification.

As I said in a previous comment, I have no idea what, if anything, to do about
the revised versions of ISO 8601, so I leave that to you to figure out. 

That said, some of the subsequent comments about ECMA International TC39 and ISO
TC154, as well as statements like "Temporal proposal having reached stage 3" and
"delegates are already working on implementing it in various engines" seem to me
to be even more of a cause for concern. If this work really is as advanced as
these statements seem to imply, and is in any way constraining on what we're
doing here, then the WG needs access to these specifications.

In case it isn't clear, the situation I want to avoid is where someone in the WG
comes up with some proposal, only to be told, "Sorry, that's not the TC39 way,
and no, I don't have anything to show you what that way actually is."

I think that covers it.

				Ned