It's interesting and a little ironic to observe how the IETF has evolved over the last 30 years.<p>Time was, the IETF was more than the standardization effort for the Internet; it was also an intellectual response to the institutional standards body of the day, the CCITT/ITU-T. Where the ITU was bogged down by process, riven by commercial interests and infighting, and unapproachable by researchers, the IETF was animated by "rough consensus and working code".<p>Clearly, in the contest between the ITU-T (CLNP) and IETF (IP), the ITU-T lost.<p>Presumably, many hundreds of people were involved in telecoms standardization at ITU-T. Where do we suppose those people went? Did they just give up on their work? Or did they instead migrate to the IETF? Either way: the IETF functions more like the ITU-T today than like the IETF of 1994. "Standards" are owned by denizens of the IETF process; new functionality unknown to the Internet is specified in standards documents before it's ever implemented, or, better yet, "standardized" in opposition to working code.<p>I'd tentatively suggest that the IETF has served its purpose, and is now at risk of outliving it.
I like how hovering over "kudos", in an attempt to understand what it is, automatically performs an action I didn't want to perform. And there is no undo.<p>Great UI there, guys. I like how you focus on aesthetic novelty instead of functionality, but I guess that explains why you're hiding the UI all over the site until you hover over crap [1].<p>[1]: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation</a>
One of the things that I love about RFCs is that they're an existence proof.<p>Sometimes I'll get asked, "How can we have a successful organization without a lot of top-down control of X?" where X is something like architecture or process or coding standards or furniture choice. When people see problems, they imagine solutions pushed through a power structure. And of course, they imagine themselves as the ones in power, forgetting how many bullshit edicts they've had to deal with over the years.<p>The Internet and its RFCs are my favorite existence proof that you don't need centralized control to get good design and reliable systems. Indeed, you could argue that the Internet, beat out the other early networks <i>because</i> it wasn't centrally controlled.
Makes sense to request comments and input as standards are being developed, but I always wondered why these documents never graduate from "RFC" to "Specification" which is what they ultimately really are.
It's interesting that the name "Request for Comments" invokes "Oh, this is a club that I can play in too," as this is the impression I've gotten as I've read increasingly more of them lately and learn how they come to exist at all.