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

2. First, some personal perspectives
Not answers

3. 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

4. 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 …

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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!

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

10. Now, some opinions
Still not answers 

11. 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 over POP vs javascript

12. 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

13. “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.

14. 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