On Sep 7, 2012, at 7:03 PM, Joe Touch wrote: > As I noted, if the IETF publishes IDs, why bother with RFCs? In addition to what Dave said, the target audience of drafts are IETF participants. The target audience of RFCs varies, but in the usual case it's implementers. So drafts might have statements like "we should decide whether this MUST is necessary", but that would be inappropriate in an RFC. Because our processes are not fast, people end up implementing from drafts. This is risky business, because implementations of draft-…-01 may not interoperate with implementations of draft-…-02. If you implement -01 you're always at risk that your implementation will become obsolete and then you'll have to worry about all those deployed products. RFCs put an end to the series of drafts, requiring a new series of drafts to change.