On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 12:17:46AM +0300, Yoav Nir wrote: > The "Experimental" designation typically denotes a specification that > is part of some research or development effort. > > However, I do not believe that this is still typical. Authors come up with ideas that they think are useful. If when the documents are ready for publication it is still not clear whether there are enough implementers convinced by the use case (some definition of running code), they are encouraged to publish them as experimental rather than proposed standard. > Yes, and surely what we want is that we continue to mislabel as many RFCs as possible in this way. We want to make our own contribution to the gradual reduction of all words to mean everything else, so that we can all communicate exclusively by mumbling, "Whatever." Now that the AP Stylebook has given up on "hopefully" and Oxford is playing with the comma, anything goes. > Neither of these can really be called an "experiment" except in the > sense of "let's see if the Internet needs this specification". Yes, and that's a stupid meaning of the term in this case, because quite frankly all the rest of the RFCs are also experiments in this sense (and many of them have delivered the clarion answer, "Don't need it at all!" When was the last time you used BEEP?) I don't know what I think about the proposal overall, but I will say that one thing definitely in its favour is that it would discourage those who think that "Experimental" is the Standards Track Consolation Prize Track. I'd be wholeheartedly in its favour, except that the old "2 year review" standards track process didn't work, so we ditched it. I don't see how recycling the approach with Experimental documents is any more likely to succeed. Best, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx