Martin, > On Jan 29, 2024, at 4:48 PM, Martin J. Dürst <duerst@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hello Eliot, others, > > On 2024-01-29 17:07, Eliot Lear wrote: >> Hi Brian, >> On 27.01.2024 22:21, Brian E Carpenter wrote: >>> >>> I don't like the "work in progress" phrase. I occasionally have to cite very old drafts such as https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-carpenter-aeiou/ to explain to somebody why IPv6 is what it is, and those drafts are very definitely not "work in progress". I have no problem with the "reference material" phrase, but it is already implied by calling something a "draft". >> It's a shortcut to be sure. Works in progress don't always... progress. I think we run the risk of clarity versus accuracy, where we could say: "work in progress at the time of posting". But does that really add anything? >> I just want to add- I am eternally grateful to academics who I are the most responsible for citation of drafts. > > Not sure how to parse that sentence (around the third 'I'). > > But I think academics are indeed relevant to the current discussion. Remember that the Internet was born in a mostly academic context. In that context, and at that time, the label "work in progress" was used to refer to unpublished stuff, stuff maybe only available to the author (at the extreme end, only in the author's head :-). > > Also, regarding the conflict between "work in progress" and a draft being expired, the expired drafts indeed disappeared from the repository, so they couldn't be cited anyway. And in those cases where they were cited, that was by academics, who supposedly knew what to do (e.g. to write "(expired)" rather than "(work in progress)", or to simply not add a label if it was clear from the context that the citation was for historical purposes. > > But times and context have changed, and so I agree that finding better terms than "expired" and "work in progress" makes sense. > There are clearly issues with the current terms, however they are in widespread usage and we have trained the Internet community to know what they mean in practice. Changing to something else will cause confusion. Especially since, as we have been discussing, the old IDs won’t ever go away. Perhaps this falls under “perfect is the enemy of the good”. Bob
