Re: PHIL: RE: Impatience

Mitra (mitra@earth.path.net)
Sat, 25 Nov 1995 17:58:31 -0800

At 12:03 PM 11/25/95, Len Bullard wrote:
>Probably not true although I've no count. The majority of standards
>are industry based, or ANSI, or ISO. They have been doing a pretty
>good job since just sfter WWII. The IETF works are industry standards. That
>industry is the Internet. It does have rules and where it doesn't
>use them, chaos emerged.

ISO takes a minimum of one 4-year period to get a standard out, and is
frequently much slower (I stand to be flamed :-). IETF also frequently
takes years, especially where there are a lot of people involved - which is
truer of higher layer standards than lower layer standards which it
generally does really well. For example URL's have only just been
standardised, after about 3 or more years of discussion.
>
>Defacto standards are often formalized by one of the formal standards
>bodies because at some point, that becomes desirable, usually to handle
>administration once the whiz-kids go home (yep, that's what they call us).

Yes - formalisation is usefull, but only after they are fairly solid.

- Mitra

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Mitra
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