[ih] "The Internet runs on Proposed Standards"

[Carsten Bormann]

On 2022-12-03, at 21:37, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> The focus of IAB/IESG/IETF/IRTF/etc. in 2022 seems to be limited to documentation.

Shiny counterexamples include HTTP/2, and QUIC+HTTP/3.
These had multiple (often open-source, and often production quality) implementation efforts in parallel plus regular meetings where interoperability was checked and improvements to the documents (and their technical content) were made or kicked off.
There also was accompanying research that went into the standards.

These are the apex of how the open source and open standard development can work together, but there are lots of other effort that did something similar, on a smaller scale.
Ones that come to my mind: The development of CoAP was also supported by multiple open-source implementation activities and interoperability events (as was ROHC a decade earlier, except that open source implementations weren’t as common in the 3G environment this was being developed for).

A different model was used for DTN (used in space these days), which started as a research group that came up with its own experimental protocols tested in lots of implementations, and which then spun off an IETF WG that did the 2.0 (actually, version 7) protocol.

So it’s not all gloomy about running code, but there needs to be an effort to make it happen, and not all ecosystems have that.

Grüße, Carsten