Re: draft-ietf-dnsind-kitchen-sink-01.txt

[John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>]

> into the dnsind WG.  Thus this represents the eighth version of the
> draft and numberous earlier comments have been taken into account.

One comment that has not been taken into account is that we shouldn't
waste any more time on this RR proposal.  It fills a "need" that doesn't
appear to actually exist.  Yes, it takes pressure off the wildly
successful TXT record, of which there must be at least a couple
hundred in the entire worldwide domain name system.  It also addresses
the other problem that every proposer of a wonderful new RR rejects
the demeaning idea that "you could just put that information into a
TXT record".  The Kitchen Sink record solves that by providing an even
more demeaning RR into which wonderful new RR ideas can be directed.
I'm sure it will be just as popular with new inventors anxious to get
their names on an RFC.

Don Eastlake is a prolific writer of Internet-Drafts, and he's very
energetic in pushing *all* of them down the standards track.  Many of
them are useful, and I appreciate Don's initiative and support for
these.  Not every Internet-Draft contains a good enough idea that the
Working Group should make a standard out of it, though.  Too many of
these I-D's seem like those bad electoral initiatives Californians are
subjected to, which keep coming back despite year after year of
rejection by the voters, until eventually some fluke in the voting
statistics causes them to pass.

There should someday be a way to finally kill off a bad proposal in
the IETF, once and for all.  In the meantime, IETF already has a
mechanism to give serious weight to apathy, though it takes a tiny bit
of backbone on the part of the Working Group.  It involves *ignoring*,
or if pressed by the author, *rejecting* bad ideas, rather than
forwarding them up the chain as if we approved of them.  RFC proposals
should be rejected not only for internal technical flaws, but also for
uselessness, inapplicability, or other lack of a serious reason for
existence.

Since the author is pressing us and mere ignoring will not suffice, I
suggest that *rejecting* this I-D is the Working Group's most
appropriate response.

	John Gilmore