Re: [apps-discuss] Possible IESG statement on IESG processing of MIME type registrations from other SDOs

[SM <[e-mail]>]

Hi Alexey,
At 08:14 03-03-2011, Alexey Melnikov wrote:
>I am working with the rest of IESG on issuing the following IESG statement:
>
>------------------------
>
>BCP 13 (currently RFC 4288) specifies that Media Type registrations
>from other Standards Organizations (SDOs) can be submitted directly to
>IESG for approval, without a need to submit an Internet Draft and to ask
>an Area Director to shepherd its publication.
>
>While this IESG statement doesn't change that, IESG would like to
>encourage other SDOs to submit their registriation as Internet Drafts,
>as this tends to improve quality of final registrations, and sometimes
>even improves quality of the underlying format itself.

The above sounds fine from an IETF point of view.

According to BCP 13:

   "The standards tree is intended for types of general interest to the
    Internet community.  Registrations in the standards tree MUST be
    approved by the IESG and MUST correspond to a formal publication by a
    recognized standards body.  In the case of registration for the IETF
    itself, the registration proposal MUST be published as an RFC."

   "The media type registration procedure is not a formal standards
    process, but rather an administrative procedure intended to allow
    community comment and sanity checking without excessive time delay."

The proposed IESG statement will end up turning 
"the posting of an Internet Draft [into] a 
necessary first step".  Martin Dürst mentioned 
that it is not always easy for people outside the 
IETF to write an I-D [1].  "The IESG's workflow 
is probably optimized for Internet-Drafts, so 
it's easy to see how this might improve things 
for the IESG, with requests ending up in the 
right tracking systems" [2].  This has the 
makings of turning the registration procedure into a formal standards process.

Regards,
-sm

1. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/apps-discuss/current/msg02319.html
2. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/apps-discuss/current/msg02315.html