Re: The Evils of Informational RFC's

[Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]>]

At 11:03 AM -0400 9/8/10, Eric Burger wrote:
>Can we please, please, please kill Informational RFC's?

Please, no.

>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?

Because their value is much higher than the harm caused by a few insufficiently-clued readers.

When we had this discussion ten years ago, there were many stories of marketing departments flogging Informational and Experimental RFCs as "standards". When we had it five years ago, there were fewer. These days, we rarely hear it, and essentially never from major companies. Our outreach efforts have mostly worked!

We have seen *huge* interoperability benefits in the past few years from publishing Informational RFCs that would never get IETF consensus, at least in the Security Area (and I suspect in other areas as well). Let's not throw that away because the occasional ideologue wants to latch on to an Informational or Experimental RFC as a reason to support his position.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium