At 17:49 20/10/2000 -0700, Kurt D. Zeilenga wrote:
I think the real issue here is whether or not the I-D describes a
practice or is a technical specification. In my option,
it is a technical specification of syntax and semantics of tags
used to indicate language information in protocols (HTTP, LDAP,
others), documents, and elsewhere. I believe technical
specifications should be published either on the Standard Track,
Informational, or Experimental. I'd prefer this I-D be considered
for publication on the Standard Track.
What turned out in practice was that the most important part of RFC 1766
was the registration procedure, including the references to authoritative
sources of tags (ISO 3166 and ISO 646).
This clearly belongs in the BCP category, as do the registration procedures
for charsets and MIME types; there is no meaningful way there can be more
than one such document.
The rest of the technical content, namely the syntax of tags (note that the
Content-Language: header itself is moved to another draft, which WILL be
standards-track) COULD have been moved to a THIRD document,
standards-track, but this did not seem like the Right Thing to do; also, if
published at Proposed, it would have required progression up the standards
track before any referring document could progress. Did not seem right either.
Someone once commented that the BCP category is best defined by exclusion:
"stuff that does not fit anywhere else". If so, that seems to apply very
well here.
--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, alvestrand(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com
+47 41 44 29 94
Personal email: Harald(_at_)Alvestrand(_dot_)no