On 7/19/16 7:54 AM, Yaron Sheffer wrote:
Once an RFC is published, there is essentially no way for readers to
provide feedback: what works, what are the implementation pitfalls,
how does the document relate to other technologies or even to other RFCs.
We IETF insiders usually know what is the relevant working group, and
can take our feedback there. Non-insiders though don't have any
contact point, and so will most likely keep their feedback to
themselves. These non-IETFers are the target audience of our
documents! Unfortunately, our so-called "Requests for Comments" are
anything but an invitation to submit comments.
There is a number of tools now that allow "web annotations" (i.e.,
comments) on various published documents. I submitted a draft [1]
recently that proposes to enable annotations on the "tools" version of
our RFCs. Technically, this is a trivial change. From a process point
of view it is more complicated and merits discussion on this list.
Sec. 6 of the draft allows you to see for yourself what such
annotations would look like.
Maybe a silly observation, but we might look at the HTML "Living
Standard" (https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/) - as maintained by
WHATWG. Their process seems to have the benefit of working reasonably
well over time.
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra