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Re: Comments regarding draft-freed-mime-p4-04.txt

On Oct 28, 2003, at 10:59 AM, ned.freed@mrochek.com wrote:

Also, some indication of how one determines
what are "recognized standards bod[ies]" would be helpful to those
unfamiliar with the IETF.

It is up to the IESG to make these determinations. And given that the set
of determinations the IESG has made is currently empty, trying to
write down a set of rules for this is premature at this point.

After there's some experience with the new procedure it probably makes
sense to write something down about this, either in a revision to this
document or in a separate document (which could be an IESG statement
and not an RFC).

Perhaps a note could be added to indicate that the IESG should be contacted to determine what qualifies as recognised, and that the set of recognised standards organisations will be collected in a note / web page, etc.

Additionally, some indication of the expected processing time (or,
ideally, service guarantees) would help other standards organisations
in planning (especially if the media type registration is required
before a document can be considered final; this might lead to an
unfortunate catch-22 situation).

I'm sorry, but I regard such indications as a complete waste of time in the
best case and actively harmful in the worst case. I'd basically be pulling a
number out of the air. It may be right or it may be wrong. And if it is wrong,
there's not much that can be done about it.

I will also point out that past experience with writing down this
sort of thing for other registration processes has not been good.

Understood. It would suffice if the IESG clearly communicated the process for registration (as this draft works towards), as well as the status of registrations in process (see below).

The resolution of the issues above, as applied to
draft-freed-mime-p4-04, would have greatly helped XMLP in its
registration of "application/soap+xml" (and I hope that it will assist
us in our future registration(s)).

None of the above issues had anything to do with delays in registration of
application/soap+xml. This particular registration has been delayed because the
document that specified it, draft-baker-soap-media-reg-03.txt, was written to
conform to a tentative registration scheme proposed on a w3c telechat that was
subsequently flatly rejected by the IESG.

When and to whom was this rejection made?

As I have explained repeatedly to the various people who asked about this, the
minute the IESG rejected this approach this draft became a nonstarter. At that
point there were two paths forward: (1) Wait for the rules to change and for
the draft to become superfluous or (2) Rewrite the draft to follow the old
rules and include a registration form. The fact that no new draft ever appeared was an implicit acknowledgment that the first course of action was the one
being followed.

No new draft appeared because we were waiting for a response from the IESG, not because a choice had been made.

You will also find notes to this effect in the public datatracker made some
time back. I do note that the document wasn't marked "revised ID needed, which
it should have been, so I just corrected that.

The only relevant information I see in the datatracker before today is a note from Harold:

This registration doesn't contain the registration forms, and the references to the specs (which are supposed to contain the forms) are to "work in progress".

However, this is just a declaration of facts, not a change in status of the registration.

Also, is the datatracker now the primary means of communication from the IESG to draft authors? I haven't yet received any e-mail beyond the initial notice of its receipt and a notice that it was temporarily assigned to Harold, both on 11 September 2003.

Regards,

--
Mark Nottingham   Principal Technologist
Office of the CTO   BEA Systems