Re: How to get feedback on published RFCs [resending as plaintext]

[Miles Fidelman <[e-mail]>]

On 7/19/16 7:54 AM, Yaron Sheffer wrote:

> Once an RFC is published, there is essentially no way for readers to 
> provide feedback: what works, what are the implementation pitfalls, 
> how does the document relate to other technologies or even to other RFCs.
>
> We IETF insiders usually know what is the relevant working group, and 
> can take our feedback there. Non-insiders though don't have any 
> contact point, and so will most likely keep their feedback to 
> themselves. These non-IETFers are the target audience of our 
> documents! Unfortunately, our so-called "Requests for Comments" are 
> anything but an invitation to submit comments.
>
> There is a number of tools now that allow "web annotations" (i.e., 
> comments) on various published documents. I submitted a draft [1] 
> recently that proposes to enable annotations on the "tools" version of 
> our RFCs. Technically, this is a trivial change. From a process point 
> of view it is more complicated and merits discussion on this list. 
> Sec. 6 of the draft allows you to see for yourself what such 
> annotations would look like.
>

Maybe a silly observation, but we might look at the HTML "Living 
Standard" (https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/) - as maintained by 
WHATWG.   Their process seems to have the benefit of working reasonably 
well over time.

Miles Fidelman


-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra