Hi Russ,
At 07:34 09-05-2011, Russ Housley wrote:
My person experience with advancing documents is that downrefs are a
significant
Thanks for sharing that.
hindrance. As you point out, procedures have been adopted to
permit downrefs, but they are not sufficient. We often see Last
Call repeated just to resolve a downref that was caught very late
in the process. These intoduce delay, and they almost never
produce a single comment from the community.
This is an extract from the output of Id-nits for draft-ietf-yam-rfc1652bis-03:
"Checking references for intended status: Proposed Standard
(See RFCs 3967 and 4897 for information about using normative references
to lower-maturity documents in RFCs)
No issues found here."
For what it is worth, the draft was intended for publication as an
Internet Standard (STD 71). As I see it, the problem here is that
"Intended status: Standards Track" is assumed to be "Proposed
Standard". As the Document Shepherd runs a draft through Id-nits, he
or she will not catch the above issue. It's unlikely that the IETF
Secretariat will catch the issue.
If down-refs are a process burden (Last Call has to be repeated) and
the community does not see any value in having that "restriction",
the IETF could do any with it. I don't think that would be a good
idea as it wipes out the notion of maturity levels.
There are a lot of things that do not produce a single comment from
the community. They are done for a reason. For example, there was a
message about "Draft Secretariat SOW for Community Comment". There
has been only one comment on that. There is a cost to adhering to a
standard of goodness. Once you do away with that, it is not as easy
to get it back.
Regards,
-sm
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf