On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Ted Lemon <ted.lemon@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Aug 10, 2013, at 8:32 AM, Hadriel Kaplan <hadriel.kaplan@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:It almost certainly will happen. But "we shouldn't do this because someone might later on draw an incorrect conclusion about what we did" is just not a valid argument against advancing the document to proposed standard. What it is is an argument for understanding the IETF process so that when people make assertions about this sort of thing, you can have a meaningful debate with them and point at RFCs. Otherwise your working group can get sidetracked by the ownership assertion problem, which as you are already aware can be very damaging
> I'm not saying that will happen in this case at all, but we shouldn't kid ourselves that it doesn't matter. If it didn't matter, people wouldn't care about labeling their IDs Informational or Experimental. People seem to *want* the PS label, and I don't think it's because people want to upgrade to an IS someday. [as an aside: that's what the 2-level RFC experiment should teach us - that there is only 1 level that people care about, in practice]
You seem to think that the IETF process is a model of clarity and purpose. For over a decade the vast majority of IETF standards were not STANDARDs.
It seems rather odd to be referring to 2026 as holly writ here when we have since changed the process so that there are two steps instead of three. This being largely to recognize the fact that the contemporary criteria for PS were far in excess of what the criteria had been twenty years ago.
Standards are what people interpret them as, no more, not less. If the IETF calls something a cat then people are going to expect it to be a feline even if RFC 3141.56 says that a 'cat' is actually an umbrella.
The obvious reading of 2026 is that Proposed Standard is a document that describes something that the IETF is proposing should be a standard and that the part that David cites states the minimum criteria for documents that are to be endorsed by the IETF as standards proposals.
Like it or not, the endorsement of the IETF is what the various people who hire consultants to work on IETF specifications are seeking.
The reason we call things "proposed standard" is because we expect interoperability. A thing that can't have or affect interoperability probably isn't a "proposed standard." In this case, what we have is definitely a proposed standard and not an informational document; the question is whether it's a standard that will get IETF consensus.
It really is neither, it is an experiment, the experiment being to see whether anyone will use it.
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