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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