Should all the building blocks be yellow? Leslie Daigle Individual IETF Participant IETF80 Technical Plenary March 28 2011

First, some personal perspectives Not answers

Let’s consider… What should exist and be “accepted” on the Internet What should be standardized Or, at least, openly specified What, in particular, should be standardized at the IETF Or published in IETF Informational, etc

What should exist Anything that Might take the form of Is wanted (by someone/something) And plays well with others Internet infrastructure Internet operations Other applications, services, activities Might take the form of Standardized infrastructure Product (software or hardware) Service Quick & dirty cron script you wrote to screen scrape some websites …

What should be standardized Anything that Requires interoperability to function Or, for which multiple independent implementations are desirable (diversity) Or, for which drawing on a broad community of expertise will produce a better outcome (“more wanted; plays better with others”) Or, which will provide a “building block” from which future things can be built

What should be standardized at the IETF Anything that Provides a building block for deploying Internetworking networks Or, provides building blocks for using the Internet to do stuff Or, benefits from the breadth of expertise within and across technology layers of Internet technology

Case Study: A brief history of hypertext 1945: Vannevar Bush posits linking/sharing trails as the only way to enable researchers to cope with the massive quantity of information being published 1965: Ted Nelson coins the term “hypertext”, and spends the next 4 decades working on the ultimate hypertext system (Xanadu) Late 1980’s: Massive research efforts to define and build usable hypertexts 1991: Tim Berners-Lee offers HTTP which cares nothing about content, but defines the interoperable protocol for linking & sharing content (presumed documents) The WWW clobbered Xanadu and any other hypertext system And that’s (probably! ;-) ) okay Standardization/building blocks win, big time Since then, HTTP has become the building block basis for a number of other applications and services, unenvisioned in the original plan

Case Study: IP… IP(v4) and friends – specify what is need in order to interoperate on the Internet Much is left to the creativity of the deployer – can do anything in the privacy of your own network That’s great, for flexibility and adaptability One of the (many) challenges to IPv6 deployment is that we don’t know what the sum of all requirements is And IPv6 breaks some of those network-specific deployments Maybe more could/should have been specified in terms of use and deployment cases Hindsight – 20/20!

The point… Get the building blocks identified and specified, and we win big Miss it – we set ourselves up for future misery

Now, some opinions Still not answers 

The future Internet We have a really bad track record of predicting the future shape or uses of the Internet Which is why we specify building blocks, not buildings And, not predicting the future is a feature But we do know: Lots of mobile Mostly not hosts in the RFC1122/1123 style More devices => It’s not just about users reading e-mail over POP vs javascript

What is it with HTTP, anyway Not all transaction models are supported in HTTP Overlaid protocols will be constrained, at some level, by the underlying HTTP transaction semantics could be expensive and ineffective. Supposing we get beyond that, the overlaid protocols are Point solutions – just stuff on the Internet Potential building blocks – needing standardization

“The widespread availability and growing sophistication of JavaScript interpreters in browsers enables web servers to push to browsers all of the application logic required to implement a client-server protocol. “ Clients do IMAP to get mail, but SMTP is an Application protocol for inter-server mail transfer. The Internet has actually flourished because any client could be a server.

Concluding thoughts A success A potential great success Develop these web-based innovations as independent point solutions A potential great success Determine the essential components and standardize them as building blocks Don’t try to imagine the sum total of possible outcomes Also, let’s talk about them as additions to the Internet landscape, not necessarily a replacement for a broader, general Internet Applications infrastructure standardization effort Many shapes and colours of building blocks