RE: [Uri-review] Fwd: Re: Informational RFC to be: draft-paskin-doi-uri-03.txt (updated from -02.txt)

I disagree with your characterization of my position;
I think that URI schemes should be "well defined".

Let me try to bring this back to first principles:

No one needs the IETF to publish a document any more.
Anyone can take a specification, publish it on their
web site, take out an ad in the New York Times or the
CACM, and get everyone else in the world to implement
their specification. Having something in funny RFC
ASCII instead of a nice easy-to-read format doesn't
help, really.

So what's the point of the IETF publishing anything?
The publication by the IETF must signify some kind
of review, that the document meets some kind of standard?
What is that standard? Well, RFC 2026 is a little fuzzy,
but in general, IETF publications are expected to
meet some kind of engineering (the E in IETF) review.

I think that includes the possibility that anyone
in the world can read an RFC, following the references,
if necessary, and figure out how to implement (E again)
the protocol (this is the "Internet" ETF after all)
specified in the document.  And the implementation
is expected, to some level, to be reasonably easy
to interpret, that the technology to implement it
is well-known, readily-available.

These are hard qualities to come up with an absolute
measure of, so we're left to 'engineering judgment',
and 'rough consensus' of engineering judgment at
that. We ask a bunch of engineers who don't have
a vested interest in the document to judge whether
it meets the fuzzy criteria.

This mailing list "uri-review" was set up to run
those kinds of reviews. And I volunteer my time
(since it doesn't have much of anything to do with
my day job) to give my opinion.

So, there you have it. If your management asked you
"hey, go implement this 'doi' scheme!", could you
do it? With the information in, or referenced by,
draft-paskin-doi-uri-03.txt?

Is it clear what it means? Or how you would go about
getting a DOI if you needed one? Or figuring out
what one pointed to if you got one?

I'd appreciate your engineering review of
draft-paskin-doi-uri-03.txt against general
IETF principles.

Larry
-- 
http://larry.masinter.net

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