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Re: Does being an RFC mean anything?

2009-03-11 16:10:56

On 11 Mar 2009, at 15:22, Lawrence Rosen wrote:

The world is now full of standards organizations that treat their works as more significant than merely "technical information." Why do we need IETF for that purpose?

The RFC series is an ongoing record of the technical underpinnings of the Internet.

Part of those underpinnings are standards, in the interests of interoperability. Other parts are records of the Internet's culture, of how people use the Internet, of good ideas that went nowhere and of bad ideas that were thrown away.

Having all these things in a single collection of documents is good for archival, research and citation as well as being good for software development and engineering. The continuity of the ongoing effort benefits from this documentation. You suggest that the archival of mere "technical information" implies that the IETF is not "serious". I think that depends very much on your idea of what "serious" means.


Joe

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