Re: Names of standards-track RFCs

At 12:56 PM 7/14/2004, John Stracke wrote:
> John C Klensin wrote:
>
> > The expansion of it
> > as an abbreviation doesn't provide significant information and
> > may, indeed, add to confusion.
> It also makes it harder to search rfc-index.txt, since names can span line 
> boundaries and abbrevations can't.
> > Now, as far as I have been able to tell, everyone who has
> > anything to do with 3GPP or its standards knows it as "3GPP".
> It's also reported in the trade press as 3GPP; I don't have anything to do 
> with it, but I recognize 3GPP and didn't recognize "3rd Generation 
> Partnership Project".
Now a different viewpoint. When looking at drafts as they go by on 
id-announce, nothing gets me more annoyed than reading the title and 
summary, and having no idea what the document is about. The audience for 
documents spreads beyond those working in the very specific area. New 
acronyms pop up often, and frequently the same acronym means different 
things to different folks in this industry. Spelling out is essential.
In the example given, the best solution likely is to say "Third Generation 
Partnership Project (3GPP)." In that way, those searching for the acronym 
will find what they want, and those trying to figure out what a document is 
about will learn the definition of the acronym.
My test when writing the abstract for a dradft is to make things 
sufficiently clear that anyone in the IETF, and most people in the 
networking business, will be able to get some idea of what the document is, 
regardless of the reader's particular focus area.
At the very least, someone reading the title and abstract of a draft (or 
RFC) should be able to come away with enough of a sense of the document to 
know whether it's a document they want to read and is applicable to them, 
or it's not.
Dan 

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