On Tue, Apr 27, 2021 at 10:18 AM Salz, Rich <rsalz=40akamai.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> There was a suggestion recently to not serve I-Ds from ietf.org domains until they were adopted by the IETF. Do you think serving individual drafts from another domain would help make that distinction clearer?
I do not think it would be worth the effort to do this. And it would probably inconvenience people who already participate and whose fingers are already permanently "trained."
> There was also a suggestion to add something to the boilerplate text of individual I-Ds along the lines of "anyone can submit an I-D; they have no formal standing until they are adopted by a group in the IETF or IRTF". Would that provide additional clarification?
Oh yes, PLEASE!
+1
If we do this, we should also explicitly say that a document has been adopted and by what group in which organization. Probably on the same line that says where to discuss it
"This draft has been adopted by the IETF FOO working group, comments on the foo@xxxxxxxx list"
"This draft has been adopted by the IRTF BAR working group, comments on the bar@xxxxxxxx list"
"This draft has been adopted by the PHB foundation XYZ working group, comments on the xyz@xxxxxxxx list"
Why would PHB foundation use an IETF list? Same reason as to publish as an Internet Draft, to be under Note Well.
If we go this route, we really need to have a final status for documents that is not an RFC. For better or worse, every RFC comes with the imprimatur of the IETF whether IETF wants to acknowledge that or not. Does the IETF really want the PHB foundation issuing RFCs? I think not. Does the IETF want to have a place where permanent records can be published of file formats etc that are referenced in specs? I think so.
The current situation in which there are WG RFCs and AD sponsored RFCs and individual submissions is wide open to abuse and has been abused. Some folk have made a career out of knowing how to get an RFC published without having the faff of going through IETF process.
IETF and IRTF drafts should definitely expire after a fixed interval and maybe 6 months is if anything too long. I can't ever remember having a WG draft come close to expiring on me. Not once.
I suggest a NOTE series that is simply a terminal state for Internet Drafts that are never intended to become RFCs but represent fixed static outputs. NOTEs would only be allowed to be INFORMATIONAL or EXPERIMENTAL. And the boilerplate would state 'This is not the result of a consensus process'.
One of the things I would use NOTEs for is to document certain file format arcana which is not otherwise available.
One of my most widely used specifications, the W3C log format was written in six hours and has never been reviewed in any standards process whatsoever. It was intended as a placeholder until we sorted something better out.
Imagine if Markdown had been published as a NOTE in 2004. We might have one version of Markdown with divergence on extensions rather than dozens of incompatible versions.
