Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
On a lexical level I would suggest that the default mnemonic be
IETF-<wgname>[-<specifier>]-<year> where the specifier is optional.
I expect specialists will continue to prefer the raw RFC
numbers and I doubt that others (including many decision
makers) care about working group acronyms. Keep it short,
as was originally proposed:
IETF-<protocol> and
IETF-<protocol>-<minimal-date>
<minimal-date> can be a 4-digit year where that suffices,
or something longer (year + letter suffix?) when multiple
documents superseding or extending each other are published
in the same year.
I foresee another problem, however. SMTP remains the
Internet's email protocol, after decades of use and
extending. Yet things could have turned out differently.
Protocols *can* get pushed aside by challengers that aren't
their descendants. For example, suppose a completely
different protocol called IEP (Internet Email Protocol)
arises in the future and, due to its vastly superior
characteristics, becomes the dominant mail transport
system. SMTP would then become historic and IEP would
need to be marked as the current standard. Under these
circumstances, an IETF-SMTP label proves a poor choice.
The usefulness of the STD-10 label, however, is unaffected.
So perhaps the generic, undated labels proposed above
should be based on service descriptions rather than
protocol names:
IETF-<service type> and
IETF-<protocol>-<minimal-date>
Eg:
IETF-EMAIL = STD-10 -> IETF-SMTP-1986
IETF-SMTP-1986 = RFC-821
IETF-SMTP-2001 = RFC-2821
[but this lacks a] means of distinguishing FTP (a
standard) from HTTP (not a standard).
I would argue that the real world thinks both are equally
standard. Which brings me to my final point. I am
fully in favour of a symbolic naming convention for STDs.
But that won't help rejuvenate the STD series -- symbolic
names are *already* used by people who aren't immersed
in the standards process. Eg people refer to the email
transport protocol as SMTP, not STD-10.
I think that, for implementors and adopters alike, a
single, absolute definition is too simplistic a view to
be meaningful in today's world. Merely renaming the STD
series won't solve the problem of deciding when/if the
STD-10 / IETF-EMAIL pointer should be changed from RFC-821
to RFC-2821. But that's a bigger can of worms.
BTW, can anyone point me to documentation of previous
attempts to solve that bigger can of worms?
-ic
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