> Hence IETF Proposed Standards are of such quality that they > are ready for the usual market-based product development and > deployment efforts into the Internet. There are too many IETF Proposed Standards for which this assertion is questionable. Perhaps if we took the time we could triage, recategorize them as Historic or Experimental. There is some metadata the IETF wishes to publish about the IETF's considered opinion as to the quality of a specification and whether it is ready for market-based product and deployment efforts. And *that* evaluation depends on operational considerations such as whether widespread deployment would be disruptive or benign, and a variety of other factors. We only have a few bits of information going along with a published specification (its status as Standard or Proposed ). If you have more to say than those few bits, we need to say it in text. In the document itself or somewhere else. Larry -- http://larry.masinter.net