Brian E Carpenter wrote: > Quite seriously - am I to conclude from the absence of comments > on that draft that everyone agrees that it correctly describes > current practice? If so, I'll look for an AD to sponsor it. You asked. Your critique itself has its pluses and minuses. On the plus side you've at least identified some of the issues that have made the document a little long in the tooth, like ASes, RFC Editor text, standard levels, interoperability reports, IPR etc. However, you have missed the forest from the trees. The fundamental description of how we behave as an organization is lost in a section by section critique. It would have been better for you to update RFC 2026 with an appendix explaining the changes and why they are necessary to reflect reality. Oh wait. I've done (or at least begun) that. Here are specific comments about your section by section critique: I think you've misinterpreted section 3.3, which discusses levels of requirements for standards themselves, not individual components of TS documents. But beyond this one has to question the whole notion of requirement levels such as those in that section. Why should they be there at all? The IETF has no force of authority other than moral, and people are not going to write code -- or support it -- for the sake of the IETF's moral authority. Similarly the discussion regarding Independent RFCs. We don't need to critique the words since the IAB & RFC Editor are working on an update. Let's go critique THOSE words. You document the broken rather than fix it. See, for instance, your commentary about PS. You yourself call out confusion regarding STDs only being assigned at PS. However, at least RFC2026 is self consistent. In addition, I would actually affirm some of the general intent that "A Technical Specification is any description of a protocol, service, procedure, convention, or format." I think "implementable and testable" are laudable goals (;-) but the way we test both is through operational experience, which is why we had the standards levels in the first place. IN PRACTICE, many standards are implemented well before they get through the IESG process, and so Internet-Drafts are largely serving the purpose of PS. Although STD1 is rarely updated it should still be so. One reason is that the web is a horrible historical medium for determining what the status of a standard WAS at in a particular time period. Eliot _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf