Re: Engineering our way out of a brown paper bag [Re: Consensus based on reading tea leaves]
On Jan 8, 2006, at 2:24 AM, Yaakov Stein wrote: I'd suggest requiring that the image format be GIF, since it's simple, stable, well documented, widely supported in both freeware and commercial software, and the patents have expired. Actually that is not quite right YET. There are patents relating to the compression used in GIF that only expire in August 2006, and a possible that goes into 2007 in some places. And from experience, these IPR holders have actively defended their rights. GNUPLOT long ago dropped support for GIF in favor of PNG for exactly this reason. I have never heard of IPR claims against PNG. Regards Marshall But, I doubt that we will come to agreement on this subject before 2007 anyway ;) Y(J)S ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
RE: Engineering our way out of a brown paper bag [Re: Consensus based on reading tea leaves]
I'd suggest requiring that the image format be GIF, since it's simple, stable, well documented, widely supported in both freeware and commercial software, and the patents have expired. Actually that is not quite right YET. There are patents relating to the compression used in GIF that only expire in August 2006, and a possible that goes into 2007 in some places. And from experience, these IPR holders have actively defended their rights. But, I doubt that we will come to agreement on this subject before 2007 anyway ;) Y(J)S ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Engineering our way out of a brown paper bag [Re: Consensus based on reading tea leaves]
Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote: --On mandag, januar 02, 2006 18:10:15 +0200 Yaakov Stein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The only thing I am sure about is that consensus on this list is for keeping everything exactly as it is. I'm pretty sure there's no such consensus. I do, however, see a rather strong consensus-of-the-speakers against using MS-Word document format for anything official. I think we need to tackle this whole issue, if we do decide to tackle it, in a much more systematic way. - what are our functional requirements? - which of them are not met today? - what are the possible solutions, and what is their practical and operational cost? - which, if any, solutions should we adopt, on what timescale? I believe that if we took a systematic approach like that, the issue of how we determine consensus would be broken into enough small steps that it really wouldn't be an issue. Brian ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Engineering our way out of a brown paper bag [Re: Consensus based on reading tea leaves]
Brian - you've hit on an important point here. It strikes me that the process for defining our own document standards has no fundamental differences from the process for defining any other standard. Why shouldn't this archival document standard be developed and adopted as a Standard in the same way? I've explicitly refrained from contributing any observations from my 15 years of experiences working with IETF docs in vi, emacs, nroff, Word, LaTeX, PDF, ASCII-art diagrams, XML2RFC, dot-matrix printers, etc., as well as experience with Word in CableLabs/DOCSIS specs - because those contributions would not be part of an engineering process like the one you describe, and would be simply more hot air if posted outside of a process. Well, one might say, haven't we tried the IETF process on the archival document format problem in the past? And the document format hasn't changed. Yup, and there are a couple of (not necessarily mutually exclusive) conclusions we might draw: * the current format is the best solution we can devise for our requirements * the IETF engineering process is flawed - Ralph On 1/5/06 7:35 AM, Brian E Carpenter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote: --On mandag, januar 02, 2006 18:10:15 +0200 Yaakov Stein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The only thing I am sure about is that consensus on this list is for keeping everything exactly as it is. I'm pretty sure there's no such consensus. I do, however, see a rather strong consensus-of-the-speakers against using MS-Word document format for anything official. I think we need to tackle this whole issue, if we do decide to tackle it, in a much more systematic way. - what are our functional requirements? - which of them are not met today? - what are the possible solutions, and what is their practical and operational cost? - which, if any, solutions should we adopt, on what timescale? I believe that if we took a systematic approach like that, the issue of how we determine consensus would be broken into enough small steps that it really wouldn't be an issue. Brian ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Engineering our way out of a brown paper bag [Re: Consensus based on reading tea leaves]
Brian E Carpenter wrote: Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote: --On mandag, januar 02, 2006 18:10:15 +0200 Yaakov Stein [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The only thing I am sure about is that consensus on this list is for keeping everything exactly as it is. I'm pretty sure there's no such consensus. I do, however, see a rather strong consensus-of-the-speakers against using MS-Word document format for anything official. I think we need to tackle this whole issue, if we do decide to tackle it, in a much more systematic way. I am in favour of any practical method that allows us to progress towards the best tools for the job. My personal end-goal is simple: I want us to be able to use modern graphical techniques in normative text to help me to describe problems and their solutions. There are many other nice-to-have's, but at the end of the day it is the diagrams that are the key missing feature in our document process. The following would be a fine set up steps on the way to determining the way forward. Perhaps my co-authors and I should attempt another draft with this structure. - what are our functional requirements? - which of them are not met today? - what are the possible solutions, and what is their practical and operational cost? - which, if any, solutions should we adopt, on what timescale? I believe that if we took a systematic approach like that, the issue of how we determine consensus would be broken into enough small steps that it really wouldn't be an issue. Maybe. The discussion on the list illustrates the well known problem of determining consensus in the presence of highly vocal members of the IETF community. This, as I recall, is a problem that was discussed some time ago in the Miss Manners talk. However it is separate problem from the issue of document formats and should be addressed as a different work item. - Stewart Brian ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
