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Ross Singer wrote:
> My point is that there's a step before that, possibly, where the
> "theory" behind unAPI, Jangle, whatever, is tested to even see if it's
> going in the right direction before writing it up formally as an RFC.
>
> I don't think the lack of adoption of unAPI has anything to do with
> the prose of it's specification document.  The RFC format is useful
> for later adopters, but people that, say, jumped on the Atom
> syndication format as a good idea didn't need an RFC first, they
> developed a spec, /then/ wrote the standard once they  had an idea of
> how it needed to work.
>   

I think this is a really important point, for us to get used to. Good 
formal standards are built _from_ best practices tested through 
experience.  Too often we try to do it vice versa, and wind up spending 
an awful lot of time on the details of standards that turn out to 
actually not solve the problem we wanted to solve as optimally as it 
could have been solved.

Jonathan