Basic ietf process question ...

[Robert Raszuk <[e-mail]>]

All,

IETF documents have number of mandatory sections .. IANA Actions, 
Security Considerations, Refs, etc ...

Does anyone have a good reason why any new protocol definition or 
enhancement does not have a build in mandatory "XML schema" section 
which would allow to actually use such standards based enhancement in 
vendor agnostic way ?

There is a lot of talk about reinventing APIs, building network wide OS 
platform, delivering SDNs (whatever it means at any point of time for 
one) ... but how about we start with something very basic yet IMHO 
necessary to slowly begin thinking of network as one plane.

I understand that historically we had/still have SNMP however I have 
never seen this being mandatory section of any standards track document. 
Usually SNMP comes 5 years behind (if at all) making it obsolete by design.

NETCONF is great and very flexible communication channel for 
provisioning. However it is sufficient to just look at number of ops 
lists to see that those who tried to use it quickly abandoned their 
efforts due to complete lack of XML schema from each vendor they happen 
to use or complete mismatch of vendor to vendor XML interpretation.

And while perhaps this is obvious I do not think that any new single 
effort will address this. This has to be an atomic and integral part of 
each WG's document.

Looking forward for insightful comments ...

Best,
R.