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IETF Turns Introspective With New Wiki
alphadogg writes to tell us that the Internet Engineering Task Force has decided to document the successes and failures of past standards and the reasons why. The hope is that lessons learned can influence future decisions. "Grading the success of the IETF standards can also serve several other functions, Crocker pointed out. It could help working groups focus their thinking on how their standards may get implemented, acting in effect a bit like a report card. A secondary benefit of the wiki is that it could serve as an aid in public relations, a place for the standards body to tout its successes. This is not the IETF's first foray into deriving lessons learned from its own work, Housley said. In 2007, Microsoft software architect Dave Thaler gave a talk at the IETF 70 meeting, held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in which he outlined some of the factors that make a protocol a success."
*if* they can marshal the manpower to maintain it properly, and understand that public engagement requires that you *engage*, and that you remember that all the smart people don't work for you; neither of these is easy.
(Ok, Slashdot? No, I am *not* not logged in, and *nine times* is my limit for trying to fix your stupidity. -- jra)
In the mid-90's, when the Web was becoming Wide, even World-Wide (Wow!), Microsoft decided that the web was entirely inadequate for the real needs of computer users. Instead, MS came up with its paradigm for how it would dominate the future of computing in hope of displacing the www. What did they come up with?
Microsoft Bob
And this company is lecturing the world on how to come up with good protocols?
To be fair, Comic Sans MS was a font developed for Microsoft Bob, and seems somehow to have become one of the more commonly used font on the web.
Tim.