Re: [yam] Referencing 1652bis and update to RFC 5321/5322

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Wednesday, June 30, 2010 19:16 +0300 Jari Arkko
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> Dave,
> 
>> In pragmatic terms, as odd as it might seem, that is almost
>> explicitly  NOT what
>> the working is chartered to do.
>> 
>> "Full" standard is really about community acceptance, rather
>> than  being about improving the specifications.  For YAM, the
>> focus in  writing the charter was specifically NOT to make
>> any interesting  changes.  Anything that seems to call for
>> interesting changes is  required to /disqualify/ the
>> specification from further consideration...
> 
> My view of the standards ladder advancement in IETF is that it
> was always a mixture of recognizing community acceptance and
> deployment success, removing crud (unimplemented features),
> and yes, even some document improvement.
> 
> In any case, if you believe that the work was useful when the
> "Full" label was available, I presume that was because the
> label would communicate to the world that the document is very
> stable, widely deployed, and so on. Would the work be useful
> if there is just another label "Internet Standard" but you
> explained the status of the work in words in the beginning of
> the document?

Sure, except that the things that go into Maturity Level and
Requirement Level change more rapidly than, and independent of,
the specification and document quality of the protocol.   That
is why we don't put Maturity Level on the front page of RFCs but
leave it for indexes and other ways of reflecting metadata.   If
one combines that perspective with your suggestion, you just
invented what have come to be called "ISDs" (see
draft-klensin-isdbis, posted yesterday).  In this form, that
proposal (the non-grouping part) could be summarized as "explain
the status where appropriate; gradually do away with maturity
levels and maybe requirement levels as categories".