Subject: RE:

From: Dan Zigmond <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 08:55:43 -0700

Keith,

With all due respect, I think you're being a little unfair and perhaps even
a bit disingenuous here.  The IESG's last call specifically sought
"significant affirmative support for this specification", without which the
IESG would recommend that the RFC Editor not publish it.  If by "affirmative
support" you actually meant "compelling technical justifications," I hope
you'll at least acknowledge that your wording was somewhat misleading.  You
may recall from our private correspondence before the last call (and I hope
you won't mind me quoting it here) that you expressed the opinion that
"Offhand I think that at a minimum a Last Call would be appropriate,
to see whether this is really supported by the community".  Again, the
messages we've seen seem to be reasonable demonstrations of support.

To be honest, I think we'd all be very surprised if it turned out that the
folks at XYZ Television Network provided us with new insights into URI
semantics or the namespace collision issues.  The problems with the draft
are by now well known, and hopefully acknowledged in the draft itself (and
to the extent that they aren't made clear in the draft, we are certainly
willing to clarify them in a revision).  The debate from the outset has been
primarily over whether this scheme is sufficiently widely used to be worth
publishing as an Informational RFC, and whether the IETF should begin work
on a standards track version instead of publishing this draft, concurrently
with publishing this draft, or not at all.  My co-author and I have claimed
that the draft represented widespread industry practice, but you very
reasonably chose not simply to take our word for that.  My understanding was
that the last call was intended to gauge exactly how widespread this support
truly is, perhaps more so than to evaluate the technical issues, which to be
honest the IESG seems well-equipped to evaluate on its own.

Television, even more so than other aspects of the Internet, is very much in
the hands of large organizations.  You or I could set up a Web server today
that supported some new extension to HTTP that we happen to be excited
about, but such a grass-roots show of support for a new protocol isn't
really possible in television, where terrestrial bandwidth generally is
licensed to corporations and other large entities, and satellites and cable
plants are cost prohibitive for individuals.  For something like "tv:" to be
used in actual television broadcasts requires companies like Disney, CNN,
DIRECTV, and E! to decide that it makes sense for them to do so.  And they
have made this decision, and are now sharing this decision with you and the
rest of the IETF community, at your request.

	Dan

---------------------------------------------------
Dan Zigmond
Senior Manager, Broadcast Applications
WebTV Networks, Inc.
[email-masked]
---------------------------------------------------

-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Moore [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Thursday, August 19, 1999 8:43 PM
To: [email-masked]'; [email-masked]';
[email-masked]'
Subject: 

Not to single out anyone in particular, but in response to the
Nth message of the form:

> We support the release of this document as an Informational RFC.

As far as I'm concerned, absent technical justification, expressions
of support (from this or any other organization) aren't much help,
and they indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of IETF.

Furthermore, to an organization like IETF which attempts to make sound
technical decisions based on the opinions of technical experts, 
an expression of support from an organization is at best, uh, difficult 
to evaluate.    It is too easy for an organization to state its 
*public position* rather than the technical opinion of the experts
in its employ.  And we'd far rather the experts speak for themselves, 
because experience suggests that they're more likely to be honest that way.

At any rate, IETF doesn't make decisions based on organizations' 
public  positions, it makes decisions based on its participants' 
technical opinions.  And IETF's participants are human beings, 
nor organizations.

Now if any of these organizations employ engineers with expertise
in these areas, who can give us good arguments as to why this
proposal isn't a problem, we'd like to hear them.  But we hope that 
they will speak freely and give us their best technical assessment, 
rather than merely repeating the public positions of their companies.

Keith Moore