ietf-822
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Re: draft-klyne-hdrreg-mail-04

2004-04-26 02:14:55

Frank,

Thank you for your comments. It's not clear from your message if you are aware that the registration procedure has been approved for BCP publication, and is currently in the RFC editor's queue. The approved Internet Draft is:
  http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-klyne-msghdr-registry-07.txt
approved for publication per:
  http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/ietf-announce-old/Current/msg28827.html

As it happens, I do not propose to make any changes, but I do feel your comments at least deserve an explanation:

At 18:14 23/04/04 +0200, Frank Ellermann wrote:
Hi, that's a very interesting document.  Maybe you could add
"structured" resp. "unstructured" to the listed mail headers,
because the MIME-encoding of 8-bit characters in unstructured
headers is rather simple.

The format of the registry is defined by the registratyion procedure, which, as noted above, has been approved as BCP.

The purpose of the registry is to provide a means for designers to find header field descriptions, rather than to actually fully describe them. Any additional information aims to support administrative rather than technical needs, which are (or should be) addressed by the technical specification.

Also, the registry may, in principle, contain field names from other protocols for which there is no concept of structured and unstructured.

The "Status: standards track" for RfC 2822 might be confusing,
because RfC 822 is a standard.  Date: and From: are not "only"
on standards track, but required.  At least one of To;, Cc:,
and Bcc: is also required.  And Message-ID: is now a SHOULD,

My response here is really variation of the above: the term "standards track" indicates that the field name is part of an approved standards-track specification, and has no bearing on whether it MUST or SHOULD appear in any message, that being part of its technical specification.

PICS-Label is no internet standard, your list says that this
is some technical report of the W3C.

Indeed. The permanent header registry has provision for including header fields defined by other bodies:

[[
  o  A Permanent Message Header Field Registry, intended for headers
      defined in IETF standards-track documents, those that have
      achieved a comparable level of community review, or are generally
      recognized to be in widespread use. The assignment policy for such
      registration is "Specification Required", as defined by RFC 2434
      [3], where the specification must be published in an RFC
      (standards-track, experimental, informational or historic), or as
      an "Open Standard" in the sense of RFC 2026, section 7 [1].]]
-- http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-klyne-msghdr-registry-07.txt
   Section 2.1

I have been advised that a W3C recommendation counts as an "Open Standard" in the sense indicated:
[[
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2002 11:38:36 -0500 (EST)
From: Scott  Bradner <sob(_at_)harvard(_dot_)edu>
Message-Id: 
<200202201638(_dot_)g1KGcaA20817(_at_)newdev(_dot_)harvard(_dot_)edu>
To: GK(_at_)ninebynine(_dot_)org, poised(_at_)lists(_dot_)tislabs(_dot_)com
Subject: Re: RFC 2026, Open Standard publishers
Sender: owner-poised(_at_)lists(_dot_)tislabs(_dot_)com
Precedence: bulk
Status:

> Do W3C count as a publisher of Open Standards for the purposes of section 7
> of RFC 2026?

yes

Scott
]]
-- a message to the Poisson working group mailing list,
   an archived copy of which I can't easily find.

I trust you find this is responsive to your comments.

#g


------------
Graham Klyne
For email:
http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact


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