At 10.35 -0500 02-02-03, Keith Moore wrote:
There needs to be some way of determining whether putting that field name
in the registry will benefit the community. It could be IESG approval,
it could be a consensus process, or it could be something else.
Ideally the process would encourage people to not only publish their
specifications but also to get review on them and to revise them
(or discard them) in light of such review.
But regardless, registering anything with a spec is simply too dangerous.
Would it not be better to register everything, but to tag
each entry with its degree of support. The tag could
have for example one of the following values:
- IETF standard
- IETF draft standard
- IETF proposed standard
- IETF experimental standard
- IETF historical standard
- ITU standard
- ISO standard
- Agreed in a consensus in a consensus forum
- Non-consensus, each alternative view is described in the registry
(example: "Newsgorups" in e-mail)
- Use discouraged according to consensus in a consensus forum
- Vendor-specific
- Commonly used, but no consensus on specification
- Experimental, may become standard in the future
At 14.16 -0500 02-02-03, Keith Moore wrote:
A registry introduces a third possibility - documenting practice that
isn't either existing or desirable.
Or even explicitly undesirable!
At 15.04 -0500 02-02-03, Keith Moore wrote:
No, I've said on multiple occasions that it's reasonable and useful to
register extensions that have consensus but don't meet the 2026 requirements
for standards track. I believe I've also said that it's generally useful
to document existing practice. It's the "register any old random
extension" idea that I have a problem with.
If the registry clarifies the non-support of the header, it is
still useful to have it there, so that people looking for
a particular header can get information about it.
Compare to dictionaries: They usually do not document only
"correct language" but also "existing language usage".
Like the word "gotten" which many people claim is slang,
even though it was standard English five hundred years ago.
--
Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/