Re: The Evils of Informational RFC's

Please, no. 

The RFC Series is not a collection of standards. It is community memory, and in it we have white papers that have been seminal such as RFC 970, problem statements, requirements documents, and analyses of a wide variety, all of which are informational. 

Let me give you two specific examples:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2804.txt
2804 IETF Policy on Wiretapping. IAB, IESG. May 2000. (Format:
     TXT=18934 bytes) (Status: INFORMATIONAL)

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3924.txt
3924 Cisco Architecture for Lawful Intercept in IP Networks. F. Baker,
     B. Foster, C. Sharp. October 2004. (Format: TXT=40826 bytes) (Status:
     INFORMATIONAL)

The former gives a view on the topic of lawful interception, and requests that anyone that develops an interception technology publish it so that it can be reviewed openly within the community. The latter does exactly that.

The collected experience in the RFC series is at least as valuable as the protocol descriptions in it.

On Sep 9, 2010, at 12:03 AM, Eric Burger wrote:

> Can we please, please, please kill Informational RFC's?  Pre-WWW, having publicly available documentation of hard-to-get proprietary protocols was certainly useful.  However, in today's environment of thousands of Internet-connected publication venues, why would we possibly ask ourselves to shoot ourselves in the foot by continuing the practice of Informational RFC publication?
> 
> On Sep 3, 2010, at 7:48 PM, Richard Bennett wrote:
> 
>> With respect, Brian, I don't think this is simply the failure of journalists to discern the distinction between Informational RFCs and Standards Track RFCs. Nobody has made the claim that the IETF produced a standard for accounting and billing for QoS or anything else. Informational RFCs are a perfectly fine record of what certain people in the IETF community may be "envisioning" at a given time, as long as people understand that "envisioning" is not the same as "requiring," which is basic English literacy.
> _______________________________________________
> Ietf mailing list
> Ietf@ietf.org
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf