Hi!
Oh, come on. IS-IS is much better than OSPF.
I am not sure if anything that uses ASN.1 can be considered better ;-) At least in my eyes, ASN.1 is an equivalent of TeX badness -10000, i.e., it makes an arbitrary protocol infinitely ugly.
It's protocol can be extended using new TLV values (as it was extended to do IPv4 routing). With IS-IS it would be much easier to deploy IPv6 or any other protocol like label distribution in MPLS. But you are right, more simple protocol wins even though it will make your live harder later.
AFAIK, the problems with adding IPv6 support to OSPF were not primarily caused by the fixed format of addresses (it would be close to trivial to change the protocol to use any format of addresses), but instead by the rather stupid design decision regarding construction of network ID's, which was problematic even with plain IPv4 CIDR. Have a nice fortnight -- Martin `MJ' Mares <mj@ucw.cz> http://mj.ucw.cz/ Faculty of Math and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Rep., Earth Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.