This draft is meant to address something that's become a significant annoyance for the IESG over the last few years: Standards Track drafts from working groups contain reasonable downrefs (often things such as Informational documents that define terminology), but those downrefs are not called out during last call, as currently required by RFC 3967, for any of various reasons... for example, the document editors put the reference in as an Informative one, but it was decided after last call to make the reference Normative, now triggering the RFC 3967 process. Do we really want to repeat the last call for that? According to RFC 3967, we have to. But there's no actual benefit to that, so it becomes process purely for process' sake -- form over substance. This draft, intended to update BCP 97 (RFC 3967), relaxes the process slightly, still stressing the need for maturity and still strongly recommending calling out the downrefs during last call, but allowing the IESG to use its judgment in the end. I think experience since RFC 3967 has shown that this is the right way to go. Discussion here, please, before Ben, who has kindly agreed to AD-sponsor this, sends it out for last call. Barry On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 2:54 PM, <internet-drafts@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > A new version of I-D, draft-leiba-3967upd-downref-00.txt > has been successfully submitted by Barry Leiba and posted to the > IETF repository. > > Name: draft-leiba-3967upd-downref > Revision: 00 > Title: Updating when Standards Track Documents may Refer Normatively to Documents at a Lower Level > Document date: 2016-08-09 > Group: Individual Submission > Pages: 3 > URL: https://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-leiba-3967upd-downref-00.txt > Status: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-leiba-3967upd-downref/ > Htmlized: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-leiba-3967upd-downref-00 > > > Abstract: > RFC 3967 specifies a process for allowing normative references to > documents at lower maturity levels ("downrefs"), which involves > calling out the downref explicitly in the last call notice. That > requirement has proven to be unnecessarily strict, and this document > updates RFC 3967, allowing the IESG more flexibility in accepting > downrefs in Standards Track documents. >