Re: Status of this memo

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Apr 27, 2021 at 10:18 AM Salz, Rich <rsalz=
[e-mail]> wrote:

> >   There was a suggestion recently to not serve I-Ds from ietf.org
> domains until they were adopted by the IETF. Do you think serving
> individual drafts from another domain would help make that distinction
> clearer?
>
> I do not think it would be worth the effort to do this. And it would
> probably inconvenience people who already participate and whose fingers are
> already permanently "trained."
>
> >    There was also a suggestion to add something to the boilerplate text
> of individual I-Ds along the lines of "anyone can submit an I-D; they have
> no formal standing until they are adopted by a group in the IETF or IRTF".
> Would that provide additional clarification?
>
> Oh yes, PLEASE!
>

+1


If we do this, we should also explicitly say that a document has been
adopted and by what group in which organization. Probably on the same line
that says where to discuss it

"This draft has been adopted by the IETF FOO working group, comments on the
[e-mail] list"
"This draft has been adopted by the IRTF BAR working group, comments on the
[e-mail] list"
"This draft has been adopted by the PHB foundation XYZ working group,
comments on the [e-mail] list"

Why would PHB foundation use an IETF list? Same reason as to publish as an
Internet Draft, to be under Note Well.

If we go this route, we really need to have a final status for documents
that is not an RFC. For better or worse, every RFC comes with the
imprimatur of the IETF whether IETF wants to acknowledge that or not. Does
the IETF really want the PHB foundation issuing RFCs? I think not. Does the
IETF want to have a place where permanent records can be published of file
formats etc that are referenced in specs? I think so.

The current situation in which there are WG RFCs and AD sponsored RFCs and
individual submissions is wide open to abuse and has been abused. Some folk
have made a career out of knowing how to get an RFC published without
having the faff of going through IETF process.

IETF and IRTF drafts should definitely expire after a fixed interval and
maybe 6 months is if anything too long. I can't ever remember having a WG
draft come close to expiring on me. Not once.

I suggest a NOTE series that is simply a terminal state for Internet Drafts
that are never intended to become RFCs but represent fixed static outputs.
NOTEs would only be allowed to be INFORMATIONAL or EXPERIMENTAL. And the
boilerplate would state 'This is not the result of a consensus process'.


One of the things I would use NOTEs for is to document certain file format
arcana which is not otherwise available.

One of my most widely used specifications, the W3C log format was written
in six hours and has never been reviewed in any standards process
whatsoever. It was intended as a placeholder until we sorted something
better out.

Imagine if Markdown had been published as a NOTE in 2004. We might have one
version of Markdown with divergence on extensions rather than dozens of
incompatible versions.