SIMPLE Made Simple: An Overview of the IETF Specifications for Instant Messaging and Presence Using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
draft-ietf-simple-simple-09

Note: This ballot was opened for revision 08 and is now closed.

(Barry Leiba; former steering group member) Yes

Summary: SIMPLE is complex.  This simple SIMPLE document explains SIMPLE simply, by providing a simple guide to the SIMPLE documents.  Simple.

Seriously, I like this, and thanks for doing it.  We should do this sort of thing more often when some of our protocol suites become hairy.

One very, very small point:
Two of the paragraphs in Section 2.1 talk about specific documents and refer to section numbers.  Those *could* be read as meaning to refer to section numbers in the documents they're talking about.  A quick glance down this file showed me that that was not the case, and it probably won't actually confuse anyone, but to dispel all doubt, perhaps it might be nice to do this?:

NEW
      The content
      of the NOTIFY messages in this package are presence documents,
      discussed in Section 2.2, below.

NEW
      A user can manage the entries in their buddy list
      using the provisioning mechanisms in Section 2.4, below.

(Pete Resnick; former steering group member) Yes

This is perfectly reasonable. It might have been nice to expand this into a full out applicability statement with more info about which particular bits you want to implement to instantiate different sets of services (and such a thing might be nice to write at some point), but this is certainly going to be exceedingly useful itself.

(Robert Sparks; former steering group member) Yes

(Wesley Eddy; former steering group member) Yes

(Adrian Farrel; former steering group member) No Objection

I agree with Stephen that it is disappointing that Section 4 does not have anything to say about security for SIMPLE. Surely, some of the existing documents are specifically relevant for security?

(Benoît Claise; former steering group member) No Objection

(Brian Haberman; former steering group member) No Objection

(Gonzalo Camarillo; former steering group member) No Objection

(Martin Stiemerling; former steering group member) No Objection

(Ralph Droms; former steering group member) No Objection

(Ron Bonica; former steering group member) No Objection

(Russ Housley; former steering group member) No Objection

(Sean Turner; former steering group member) No Objection

I agree with Stephen's comments.

(Stephen Farrell; former steering group member) No Objection

- Would it not be an idea to also say how SIMPLE and XMPP
relate to one another and why we're putting in effort on
SIMPLE when XMPP is perceived to be much more widely
deployed? (Sorry if that's controversial, but readers will
wonder I reckon.)

- Maybe it'd be good to have a list of obsoleted RFCs just
to help the reader know that they are obsoleted and by
what.

- You could add a note that some later numbered RFCs are
really updates to earlier ones so the numbering sequence
isn't significant. (I'm sure some readers would be
confused otherwise, e.g. by 4662 being an extension to
6665.)

- It would have been nice if section 5 had given a
paragraph or two of overview of SIMPLE security.

(Stewart Bryant; former steering group member) No Objection