[ietf-dkim] A meta-note: stepping back from the feature discussion

[SM]

At 15:48 02-06-2009, Jon Callas wrote:
>Stepping back for a moment, we have a number of questions that are 
>on their surface reasonable questions.

Most of the questions asked seem reasonable to me.  Having to answer 
them all is another question.

>For some set of features, should a given feature be removed?

It's two years too late to answer that.

>Standardization is a process of compromise. In the IETF, we 
>pronounce compromise as "rough consensus." In any compromise or 
>rough consensus, there are things that are controversies. For my 
>purposes here, I will define "controversy" to be anything that is 
>not unanimous.

Yes.  And some of the features that have been added were 
controversial at that time.  If we want our implementation to be RFC 
4871 compliant, we implement these features.  There is nothing that 
forces us to implement a feature we view as "bad".  We can even say 
that our implementation is RFC 4871 compliant but that doesn't make 
the implementation interoperable.

Regards,
-sm