> From: Richard Barnes <rbarnes(_at_)bbn(_dot_)com>
> What is clearly going on here is that our branding is out of sync with
> the expectations of our customers. Whatever their historical meaning,
> RFCs are now interpreted by the broad community as documents that have
> the been reviewed and approved, to a greater or lesser degree, by the
> Internet community.
This may be true, but it's also basically irrelevant to the point at hand.
Even if we stopped using the RFC series for non-standards documents, and
started a new series for indepedendent, IRTF, etc documents, (which we might
call the CFR series, with the letters reversed - it has a nice un-official
expansion, 'Can't xxx Read', in honour of those who would make it necessary)
the question of 'what authority, if any, the IESG should have over documents
in that document series' remains.
Simply not providing a dissemination path for such non-IETF document is not,
IMO, an option that's even worth discussing at any length. We need one, and
the question will remain over how much, if any, authority the IESG will have
over it.
(Temporarily reverting to your point about the series name, the problem of
the world thinking that 'RFC'=='Standard' has been with us for a long time,
and a number of things have been tried to fix it, with varying degrees of
success - the STD numbers, Internet-Drafts, etc. I generally don't put a lot
of weight on people who aren't up to speed on the details, just like I'm not
bothered by the many network users for whom 'the Internet' == 'the Web' - I
don't see any value in renaming things there, in line with their muddled
and/or simplistic model, either.)
> it's not clear to me why the independent stream exists at all, other
> than for historical reasons.
As a place for the networking community to publish things in a way which is
guaranteed to have universal, easy, ubiquitous and free access - something
which publishing in a journal does _not_ accomplish.
Noel
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