On Apr 20, 2012, at 5:40 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote: > 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. No, I don't believe they are mislabeled, they just don't fit the statement in RFC 2026, and they're not scientific experiments. It gives fair warning to would-be implementers regarding the maturity of the specification. Other implementations may not have implemented this RFC (if it's an extension), or they may solve the same problem with some other mechanism. Or they may even have implemented the same RFC, but we're not sure yet that it's unambiguous enough and error-free enough to produce interoperable implementations. > 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. True. Perhaps if successful standards were advanced form Proposed to something else, there would be less pushback against publishing ideas with little running code as PS. Surely your little idea with no running code can't be in the same category as TLS, right?