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Re: draft-phillips-langtags-08, process, specifications, "stability", and extensions

2005-01-06 09:48:41


--On 6. januar 2005 06:24 -0800 ned(_dot_)freed(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com wrote:

I believe that John meant sect. 2.5 of RFC 3066, which does indeed
mention a matching algorithm.  However, the proposed changes in the
structure of tags interact badly with that algorithm.

My reading of that text is that it goes out of its way to try and avoid
direct discussion of a matching algorithm, talking instead about "rules"
and "constructs". I no longer recall the circumstances behind this, but
my guess would be that talking about algorithms directly moved this
specification a bit too close to implementation work, which in turn would
argue for the normal standards track and its ability to assess interop
status, not BCP.

I lifted that stuff from RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1), which is at Draft. The reason for putting it in 3066 was that people wanted to refer to it without having a normative dependency on HTTP. The fact that it doesn't call itself an algorithm is probably mostly an effect of the writing styles of the various authors involved.

If we were splitting 3066 into a standards-track format specification and a BCP registration procedure, this should certainly go into the format specification - but I would argue that the RFC 3066 section 2.3 algorithm has sufficient interoperability experience and Internet-scale deployment that the correct status for it is Standard, not Proposed.

                  Harald






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