Re: Some cautionary comments

[Fred Baker <fred@cisco.com>]

Very much agree. I'll add my two cents...

At 01:33 PM 1/15/01 -0500, Mark Day wrote:
>1. Negotiation of parameters
>
>It is often tempting to defer a hard choice in a protocol design by saying
>that multiple possibilities will exist, with a negotiation at runtime.  The
>unfortunate result is that every implementation has to deal with all the
>possibilities.  In addition, negotiation structures complicate the process
>of interoperability testing.

Very much agree. IMHO, this was the downfall of the OSI protocol suite - 
interoperability went pretty much out the window. It is in the working 
group's interest to make the hard decisions, and to make them in the 
direction of simplicity unless there is a very good reason not to.

>2. Hypothetically useful capabilities
>
>Since we are creating new protocols and enabling new kinds of system to be
>built, it is tempting to start imagining entirely new ways of using them.

The thing to do with these is pull them out into separate drafts, so they 
can be explored by those interested in them, but keep them out of the base 
specification. These become in some sense experimental procedures.

>This can be fun but it's not very functional.

It also tends to kill a lot of time, and the base protocol often develops 
odd characteristics that are perhaps the right thing to do if the feature 
is useful, but for most purposes is suboptimal.