I agree that there are many cases where improvements in references and flagging prior work would be useful in IETF documents. I don’t think this is a something where we should be looking for new process or a dramatic difference to current practice. IETF documents tend to do the right thing in many cases, but often focus on the standards issues (e.g., referencing other documents for the sake of interoperability issues or need to understand them for implementation reasons). However, I do think referencing prior work, setting context to how present work differs from other work, attribution, and (generous) acknowledgment of contributions are important. And in some of these cases we could do a better job. Although that’s hard work and requires those LC comments and maybe a bit of a shift in thinking how one is supposed to write RFCs. Some improvements in tooling might actually be quite helpful here as well… struggling today with some references in XML2RFC... Jari
