--On Tuesday, June 11, 2013 14:51 -0700 Michael Thornburgh
<mthornbu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>...
>> "At the time of writing, the Adobe Flash Player runtime is
>> installed on more than one billion end-user desktop
>> computers."
>>
>> Shouldn't the memo be about the protocol?
>
> agreed. i included this statement at the suggestion of the
> Responsible (and Sponsoring) Area Director, to help establish
> the breadth of deployment of the protocol, and therefore the
> relevance of the specification in the RFC Series as an
> independent submission. the Shepherd, A-D and i are
> discussing your concern regarding this statement off-list.
> possible solutions are: move this comment to the Shepherd
> write-up for the IESG's consideration, change the wording to
> be more neutral, leave as-is or strike it completely.
Michael, SM, and others,
I think the advantages to the community of having
widely-deployed protocols like this published for information
are considerable. It seems to me that those advantages are
increasingly getting lost in our quest for consensus (or even
unanimity). Perhaps we should be handling them all as
Independent Submissions where the community wouldn't even think
it had a "vote", but, as Michael points out, community review
often improves document quality.
For such a protocol, information about how widely deployed it is
and even the context in which it is used are important
information, nearly as important as the protocol specification
itself. Without that information, it would be very hard to tell
a description of a widely-deployed protocol that it is useful
for the community to know about from a description of a fantasy
(or even the product of a fictitious standards body) that the
author hopes others will pick up and use. By contrast, for
standards-track documents, that information is less important:
it changes more proportionally, the recommendation is based more
on engineering and other technical quality issues, and it is an
IETF recommendation.
So, assuming the document is accurate and clear, I think our
principles should favor publication and should favor publication
with the deployment comment included.
best,
john