On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 10:39:51 PST, Bob Braden said:
Yes. So let's consciously endeavor to ensure that sigificant
non-standards documents -- responsible position papers, white papers,
new ideas, etc. -- become RFCs. (Making Internet Drafts into an
archival series seems like a terrible idea to me, but that is a
different topic.)
Out of curiosity, where would the I-D that described Mail-Followup-To: fall in
this spectrum? This is an example of something that's widely deployed(*), and
definitely not a "non-standard", but we (for whatever reason) never got an RFC
out the door.
There's been other good ideas, or reasonable starts at same, that have expired
out of the I-D directory and never been published. And unfortunately for the
person doing the literature review, this is a big problem, because the drafts
that *aren't* published are an important resource for ideas, both good and bad.
Yes, you still get to dig for which of the two it was, but in either case,
finding
that the same (or similar idea) has been proposed before can be important...
(*) So far this year, I've received 598 pieces of mail with one, out of 9,017
mails I saved the headers for (which included all the spam I've seen so far).
So in at least some communities, it's being used by a significant percentage of
users. Compare to 559 for multipart/signed, for which (a) there *is* an RFC
and (b) 150 of which were my own postings to mailing lists...
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