Moin!
On 11.03.2009, at 20:22, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
There are, it appears, many types of IETF RFCs, some which are
intended to be called "Internet standards" and others which bear
other embedded labels and descriptions in their boilerplate text
that are merely "experimental" or "informational" or perhaps simply
"proposed standard". One contributor here described the RFC series
as "a repository of technical information [that] will be around when
I am no longer around."
Every document published as an RFC has one of the tags you mention on
it. So it exactly describes what's meant there. I can't see a problem
with that. Technology advances and so should our standards, or best
practises do. The IETF does this by publishing documents that are
relevant to a technology in an open and documented process. A lot of
stuff that is an RFC is updated or obsoleted by later documents and
all of that is openly discussed and later documented.
However even that information published as RFCs might not be enough
for someone to implement a protocol. My favorite current example is
the contradiction of RFC3597 and RFC4034 on what DNS records have to
be in canonical form. In that case the older RFC3597 was right and
this has already been acknowledged in draft-ietf-dnsext-dnssec-bis-
updates (http://tools.ietf.org/wg/dnsext/draft-ietf-dnsext-dnssec-bis-updates/
) however this has not yet become an official document aka RFC.
But even in that case the IETF process is totally open and anybody
could follow this, and if I want to implement stuff in a certain area
the IETF due to it's openness gives me all the necessary information
to do that, and more than just the plain standards would describe. I
see this as a positive and not a negative thing.
So long
-Ralf
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Ralf Weber
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