Re: [Pals] Barry Leiba's No Objection on draft-ietf-pals-ms-pw-protection-03: (with COMMENT)

I endorse a policy of spelling out acronyms on the first occurrence in
the body text a document if there is any doubt as to whether or not
that should be done. Even if someone went to the faintly ridiculous
length of spelling out IETF and IP and TCP once, when they first
occurred in the body text of a document, what harm would it do?

It seems to me that, although the RFC Editor has a list which informs
their RFC editing, the effective rule is approximately that the
authors of a draft make an initial determination but they later have
to spell out the first occurrence of any acronym when asked to do so
by any of the WG Chair, Shepherd, Directorates, ADs, or other
reviewers. I think that works out fine.

Thanks,
Donald
=============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   +1-508-333-2270 (cell)
 155 Beaver Street, Milford, MA 01757 USA
 d3e3e3@gmail.com

On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 4:05 AM, Barry Leiba <barryleiba@computer.org> wrote:
>> Thanks for your comments, and that leads to a question. All of the
>> abbreviations that you cite are included in
>> https://www.rfc-editor.org/materials/abbrev.expansion.txt
>
> Right; that's where I checked whether they were approved as not
> needing expansions.
>
>> when do you need to expand commonly used acronyms, and when not?
>
> As the above URL says:
> "Some abbreviations are so well known that expansion is probably
> unnecessary.  The RFC Editor exercises editorial judgment about whether
> a particular use of one of the "well-known" abbreviations requires
> expansion.  (For example, strict adherence to the expansion requirement
> can lead to impossibly ugly titles.)  In the following list of
> abbreviations, those that are usually (but not necessarily) treated as
> "well known" are marked with asterisks.  However, since there are so
> many different abbreviations and there is a range of knowledge among
> RFC readers, we tend to expand abbreviations in case of doubt."
>
> In my review, I only called out ones that do not have asterisks.
> "MPLS", "LDP", and some others *do* have asterisks, and don't need to
> be expanded.
>
> Barry
>
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