On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 10:46 PM, Sam Johnston <samj@samj.net> wrote:
On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 7:47 PM, Alexis Richardson
I think it's best you stick to calling the consensus based on discussions,
That's the plan I'd like: Discussions - on this list - about clear changes to a specific draft.
which hopefully you will also be contributing to (there's no harm in wearing both hats if you keep the roles separate).
Ha, I hope so.
Such a "test" is highly subjective and easily [ab]used to short circuit consensus and/or suppress ideas you don't personally understand or appreciate.
Yes, our current process is too open to such abuses.
Case in point is the unjustified claim that using HTTP headers for metadata is somehow experimental "new technology" when it was explicitly defined for this purpose by RFC2068 over a decade ago and used extensively since:
Entity-header fields define optional metainformation about the entity-body or, if no body is present, about the resource identified by the request.
If applying this to more metadata has been such a good idea for a decade, why wasn't it adopted much more? Answer - we don't know. This absence of certainty appears to have been a legitimate source of concern for many people.
Conversely the creation of a domain-specific language for each and every resource that we need to represent (at least 3 for infrastructure, 5-10+ for platforms and an infinite number for applications) and somehow keeping that in sync with authorative "native" representations like OVF is *far* more experimental, error prone and ultimately likely to fail.
We are doing infrastructure, and basing it as much as possible on prior art. alexis