Re: RFC abbreviations list

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2020-07-26, at 01:00, Joel Halpern Direct <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> It may be that we are not doing a good job adding terms to the RFC list of abbreviations which do not need expansion on first use.

There is a big difference between expansion on first use (in abstract and  document) and expansion in the title.

8778 Use of the HSS/LMS Hash-Based Signature Algorithm with CBOR Object
     Signing and Encryption (COSE). R. Housley. April 2020. (Format:
     HTML, TXT, PDF, XML) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD) (DOI:
     10.17487/RFC8778) 

CBOR was ready to no longer be expanded here, but imagine we had expanded that and HSS/LMS in that title as well.  This one of several RFCs that no longer expands CBOR in the title, but CBOR is not starred in https://www.rfc-editor.org/materials/abbrev.expansion.txt — CDDL (*) isn’t even in there.

Oh, and RSA was never expanded in an RFC title.  MD5, SHA, ...

Looking at the way RSVP-TE was handled in RFC titles over the years makes me nauseous.

(Toerless’ original point was that, if you add contentiousness to that list — abbreviation expansions are rarely contentious, but the original subject of the thread this thread exited from was — such a list would not stay healthy.  But that is not my point, just that you need to clean the dust out of the fans once a year, and if you do not have a preventive maintenance schedule, that won’t happen.)

Grüße, Carsten

(*) CDDL was originally the CBOR Data Definition Language (CDDL), which I surmise would have become the Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) Data Definition Language (CDDL).  We shortened that to Concise Data Definition Language (CDDL), mainly because it was the right thing to do, but probably also motivated by the inevitable monster expansions.  Still…

8610 Concise Data Definition Language (CDDL): A Notational Convention to
     Express Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) and JSON Data
     Structures. H. Birkholz, C. Vigano, C. Bormann. June 2019. (Format:
     TXT, HTML) (Status: PROPOSED STANDARD) (DOI: 10.17487/RFC8610)