Re: WG Review: Effective Terminology in IETF Documents (term)

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

Hi Jari,

On 14-Apr-21 04:44, Jari Arkko wrote:
> Brian,
> 
>> I believe that the charter is good enough as it is, but I also believe
>> that the IESG should consider not only whether there is consensus on the
>> charter text, but also the basic question whether this issue should be
>> handled by the IETF at all, rather than by the RFC Editor. 
> 
> I think that’s a good question.
> 
> I have a view on that, and interestingly I came to a different conclusion than you did. Perhaps it would be useful to talk about this a bit further.
> 
> So, my reasoning is that the right place for most IETF decisions is at the working groups. (Subject to some common policies and full IETF review, of course, as discussed in the other thread…)

Yes, certainly.

> I could imagine RFC Editor adjusting text in a security considerations section that talked about some filtering and used older versions of “denylist” in the text. But I’m not sure I’d want the RFC Editor to adjust a major term picked by a working group in their protocol, particularly when the change may cause differences between a new RFC and older RFCs to occur. I’d want the WG to make that determination. For an example, see https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-rfc8446bis-00#section-1.2 
> 
> All this leads me to believe that the WGs are and should be in charge of the bigger modifications. 

Completely agreed. But my concern is that the RFC Series as a whole would look pretty stupid if (to take a strawman example) the IETF "enforced" 'blocklist' and the IRTF "enforced" 'denylist' and some other stream decided that 'blacklist' is just fine.

So while I am not actively opposed to starting the TERM WG, I am concerned about how we will proceed later on at the level of the RFC series as a whole.

> This still leaves room for:
> 
> - a new terminology working group to provide guidance & principles
> - RFC editor to check and adjust text (and possibly highlight issues back to the authors)*
> 
> Brian, what was your thought regarding the division of work and who would do what? And in your mind, what level of decisions would be required for actions similar the examples above?

What you describe is fine as far as the IETF stream goes.

Regards
    Brian
 
> Jari
> 
> *) Lars’ working group proposal does not involve the working group actually developing a list of terms. That too could possibly be a thing that the RFC Editor could do. But of course the community could do it also, as volunteers in some design-team like activity, or we could find an entirely external resource that is updated with information.
>