Re: [idn] Presentation suggestion about "requirements" doc

[Rick H Wesson <wessorh@ar.com>]

Dan,

I whole heartedly disagree with your suggestions. The requirement
documents put constraints on the proposals REQUIRING them to conform to
prearranged constraints. your suggestion severely limited the working groups
ability to effectively evaluate proposals.

I therefore can't agree with your suggestion, after all working groups
often use requirements documents to avert such circumstanceses that would
occur should your proposal be implemented.

we MUST be able to effectively evaluate the proposals and move forward to
some conclusion.

-rick

On 4 Mar 2001, D. J. Bernstein wrote:

> I propose replacing ``Requirements'' with ``Considerations,'' and
> rephrasing the document accordingly. For example, instead of saying
>
>    The protocol MUST NOT require that the current DNS cache servers be
>    modified to support IDN.
>
> we can say
>
>    Does this IDN solution require revision and redeployment of DNS
>    caches? How difficult are the software changes? There are a huge
>    number of caches on the Internet, perhaps millions. Upgrading them
>    all will take time and effort, even if the software changes are easy.
>
> and instead of saying
>
>    It MUST make the minimum number of changes to existing protocols on
>    all layers of the stack
>
> we can say
>
>    How many protocols are changed by this IDN solution? How extensive
>    are the changes? For example, what changes are required in the SMTP
>    protocol? There is a cost to changing a protocol, beyond the cost of
>    changing implementations: namely, new protocol specifications must be
>    written and distributed.
>
> Readers should be able to look back at this document and understand what
> we were thinking.
>
> James Seng/Personal writes:
> > 2. If we can't nail down Requirements, it would be fairly difficult for
> > us to move forward with the next step, ie, comparison and protocol.
>
> It will be helpful to have a good framework for rational comparison of
> the IDN proposals. But the current Requirements document doesn't seem to
> have been written for this purpose. It appears to be an attempt to slip
> a bunch of bad decisions past the WG. It's missing the justifications
> that a legitimate document would have, and it imposes several premature
> restrictions upon the directions that the WG can go.
>
> ---Dan
>