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Jonathan West wrote:
>
> Hi whirlers,
>
> Starting next month, I'm going to be taking part in a project at ETSI
> (European Telecoms Standards Institute) writing some documents providing
> guidance to ETSI's technical committees on "making better standards".
Also -- and I'm definitely wearing an evil grin as I suggest this -- you
might want to find a copy of Mike Padlipsky's "Elements of Networking
Style". It is almost certainly the funniest technical book ever written,
a really vicious critique of the ISO seven-layer nonsense, with chapter
titles like "Low standards: a critique of X.25". It was written mid-80s
so it's now badly out of date, but still worth reading. If you cannot
find the book, several chapters were published as RFCs, 871 to 875 I
think.
> I'm especially interested in the thoughts of those of you who are landed
> with the job of trying to read, understand and implement the standards
> rather than just those who write them. I suspect that far too many standards
> are written an a way that makes them all but impenetrable to anyone other
> than those who participated in the committee that wrote them. If you are a
> standards user, then I particularly want to hear from you.
>
> I'm not able to chase into technical issues on individual standards, but
> would be willing to obtain and look at individual documents if they can be
> used to illustrate a more general point.
One to look at would be the various critiques of the IPsec standards
(RFCs 2401-2409, 2451 and a few others). My docs for FreeS/WAN, the
Linux implementation of those standards, include:
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