[throwaway156503]

> None of the people working on this spec are idiots

There are a lot of very smart people in the world that lose sight of simple concepts and their value, however.

[AceJohnny2]

I've witnessed some Standards negotiation in a previous job, involving the Khronos OpenMAX standard (which is DirectShow/GStreamer for mixed HW/SW multimedia codecs).

My company and another had opposing solutions to a problem, which made opposite tradeoffs and opposite implementations (ours worked better for a more HW-focused solution, theirs for a more SW-focused solution)

How does one choose? In the end, it's backroom negotiation, diplomacy, and compromise. In other words, politics.

[rswail]

In other words, and as the IETF demonstrates, consensus.