RE: netconf WG charter proposal

[Andy Bierman <abierman@cisco.com>]

At 03:25 PM 4/9/2003 -0400, Harrington, David wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I haven't seen anybody actually raise this point.
>
>If the CLI is currently the best mechanism to do configuration, but suffers from lack of standardization, why are we moving to XML? Why aren't we just addressing the problem of standardization of the CLI?

Who said CLI is the best interface for configuration management?
On many devices, it is the only interface that allows full,
initial, and OOB configuration.  Also, you are ignoring the
distinction between a human interface and a programmatic interface.


>Wouldn't it be simpler to standardize a CLI syntax and data model using existing ascii-style text and the associated tools, than to standardize an XML syntax and data model from scratch?

Huh?  It won't be simple at all to get vendors to agree
on the One True CLI Design.  We aren't starting from scratch
with XML. Look at http://www.w3c.org/ at the massive amount 
of work already done on XML standards.

You want to write an SMI for CLI syntax?  It is so much
easier to use a standard that meets our needs and is already
deployed.  We need the data modelling capabilities of XML Schema,
the UTF-8 encoding for internationalization requirements, the
validation features of XSDs, the separation of meta-data and data,
and on and on...


>dbh

Andy


>>Andy>    - Uses a data representation that is easily manipulated
>>Andy>      using non-specialized text manipulation tools
>>
>>So XML is out if I take that text serious. XML documents have
>>structure and to really operate on them, you need to have tools that
>>understand the structure. The good news is that there is an increasing
>>amount of such tools.
>
>>I will change the text to say XML will be used
>
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