At 14:42 26-05-2009, Alexey Melnikov wrote:
There have been two Last Call notices sent to the IETF for:
'Internet Mail Architecture' <draft-crocker-email-arch> as a
Proposed Standard
The IESG has received a concern about the intended publication
status of this document and wishes to confirm the community's preferences.
As the shepherding AD I would like to request more feedback on this
topic. Please send
It would disingenuous of me not to acknowledge and commend the effort
by Dave in writing this draft about Internet Mail.
Please indicate your preference for publishing the document as:
1. Proposed Standard, as queried in the two Last Call notices
2. Informational
3. Some other label
4. I have another opinion (please describe)
Also please indicate your reason(s) for this choice.
There is an obsoleted "Request for Comments" (it's not a RFC) from
the Network Working Group which was distributed to six people. One
of the six people is most likely subscribed to one of the mailing
lists this message is addressed to. I'll quote a few lines from the document:
"Philosophical positions without examples or other specifics,
specific suggestions or implementation techniques without
introductory or background explication, and explicit questions
without any attempted answers are all acceptable."
The document also stated that one of the reasons for the standards
(or lack of them) is that:
"There is a tendency to view a written statement as ipso facto
authoritative, and we hope to promote the exchange and discussion of
considerably less than authoritative ideas."
The discussions between various IETF participants about this draft
highlight the philosophical differences about Internet Mail. In
spite of these philosophical differences, there has been "standards",
Informational and Experimental documents about email. Some of the
standards have matured into Internet Standards. The name may sound
grand. If you think about it, we rely on its acceptance by the
Internet community. Internet Mail share a similar characteristic in
the sense that the message delivery relies on the acceptance by part
of the Internet community, the broader the better.
Some people view published documents as authoritative. If you say or
do something wrong, someone might tell you "read the RFC" or "the RFC
says so". I prefer the former when the RFC contains a good
explanation. Sometimes an RFC doesn't explain why things are done in
a particular way. Over the years, most, if not all, of the authors I
have come across have graciously explained the why when I sent in a question.
I don't adhere to the practice of using a "standard" as a bat as it
is not a good way to promote ideas or to encourage adoption of the
"standard". It may be frustrating for those that have been around
for a long time to hear the same questions and having to repeat the
same answers over and over or to field off technically naive
proposals. I hope that the author of RFC 875 won't mind the minor
change I made in quoting the following:
Often, it's the Oral Tradition that matters; some RFCs, in their
attempts to seem scholarly, offer the wrong levels of abstraction
or, because of the backgrounds of their authors, are so
ill-written as to fail to communicate well. Sometimes, however,
that which is truly relevant turns out to be unfindable by a
conventional literature searcher because it isn't "in" the field
of search.
Regards,
-sm
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