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RE: [TLS] Review of draft-housley-tls-authz-extns-05

2006-05-24 15:44:39


On Wednesday, May 24, 2006 02:57:21 PM -0400 Russ Housley <housley(_at_)vigilsec(_dot_)com> wrote:

Right.  I am proposing the addition of "(Informative)" after the KeyNote
section title.  Also, I proposed assigning the KeyNote code point from
the "specification required" set of numbers instead of the set that is
associated with standards track documents.

Then I think you should do it in a separate document.

Labelling a section as "informative" does not make it true. The proposed text describes how to implement a feature, and as Pasi points out, it is impossible to produce interoperable implementations of that feature without reading that section. Thus, the section is not informative in nature; it is a normative description of an optional feature. The same applies to the reference.

What you really want to do is be able to declare that part of the document to be informational. Thus there would be no downreference, and a year or ten from now when you want to advance the document to draft, it won't be held back due to the lack of independent interoperable implementations of the optional feature. Of course, then you'd end up with the number allocation being a normative downreference from the standards-track portion of the document to the informational portion, but that can be resolved easily enough, since it's really just prepopulating a registry.

Unfortunately, our process doesn't have any mechanism for documents which have both a standards-track part and an informational part. While I think what you're trying to do here is reasonable in its intent, I also think that it's likely to create trouble down the road, not because of the normative downref to RFC2704, but because of confusion about the status of the non-standards-track portion of the document. Not to mention the precedent it sets for the next time when someone wants to do the same sort of thing, but with bad intent and undesirable results.

-- Jeff

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