Subject: Re: Remote UI BoF at IETF63

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Jul 2005 12:25:27 +0200

Vlad,

while I think this is a very interesting area for research and perhaps 
development, I've got to ask the questions that Dave Crocker always pulls 
up as standard questions for new work in the IETF.....

- What expertise do you see that the IETF has (and other groups do not 
have) that makes it the right body to work on this set of issues?
- What importance to the Internet does this work have that makes it a 
correct use of IETF resources?

In the terms of the IETF mission statement, RFC 3935:

   The goal of the IETF is to make the Internet work better.

   The mission of the IETF is to produce high quality, relevant
   technical and engineering documents that influence the way people
   design, use, and manage the Internet in such a way as to make the
   Internet work better.  These documents include protocol standards,
   best current practices, and informational documents of various kinds.

this would definitely fall into the "use" category. But RFC 3935 also says:

   In attempting to resolve the question of the IETF's scope, perhaps
   the fairest balance is struck by this formulation: "protocols and
   practices for which secure and scalable implementations are expected
   to have wide deployment and interoperation on the Internet, or to
   form part of the infrastructure of the Internet."

   In addition to this constraint, we are also constrained by the
   principle of competence: Where we do not have, and cannot gather, the
   competence needed to make technically sound standards, we should not
   attempt to take the leadership.

I must admit that I, like Dave, find the concept fascinating, and that 
existing protocols like the X Windows protocol may not be the right fit for 
your requirements, but the IETF is an organization that has traditionally 
run very far and fast away from any mention of the words "user interface", 
so it seems like a bit of a strange fit....

More background, please!

                 Harald

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 03 Jul 2005 12:06:14 -0700

Folks,

Since his name was taken in vain (vein?), Dave will proffer his own answer's 
to Harald's questions.  (OK, I'll admit it.  I'd be offering this response 
even if Harald hadn't referenced me.)

> have) that makes it the right body to work on this set of issues?

This is an effort to specify an open, platform-independent method of 
maintaining remote display objects, called widgets.  The application-level 
object-maintenance protocol that is described in 
<http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-stirbu-lrdp-00.txt> is very nicely 
simple.

This means that the real work of pursuing such a service covers the 
network-based mechanics of connectivity, reliability, security, and so on.

That's a set of activities about which the IETF has better experience than 
anywhere else.

> correct use of IETF resources?

(I'm still working on my understanding of where this work fits, among a range 
of higher- and lower-level work, as well as work that might be called 
"competing" work. Therefore my response here is quite tentative.)

Existing open and deployed work has a focus either on the micro-behaviors of 
drawing graphics, or the macro-behavior of pure presentation.

The current work navigates space in between these two, creating and 
maintaining remote, user-visible "objects".  Hence it combines lessons learned 
from html, xml and object-oriented programming, into a specification of an 
object-oriented display and input environment, with presentation controlled by 
style templates.

Other comparable work is proprietary.

> existing protocols like the X Windows protocol may not be the right fit 
> for your requirements, but the IETF is an organization that has 
> traditionally run very far and fast away from any mention of the words 
> "user interface", so it seems like a bit of a strange fit....

Although formally valid, use of the term "user interface" for this work is 
entirely unnecessary.  At the least it is too broad. In fact it has pretty 
much nothing to do with human factors, cognitive science, or usability.

On looking at the proffered draft document, calling the proposal something 
mundane like "remote widget exchange service" would be more precise and, I 
suspect, far more helpful.

-- 
 
   d/

  Dave Crocker
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