At 11:03 AM -0400 9/8/10, Eric Burger wrote:
Can we please, please, please kill Informational RFC's?
Please, no.
Pre-WWW, having publicly available documentation of hard-to-get proprietary
protocols was certainly useful. However, in today's environment of thousands
of Internet-connected publication venues, why would we possibly ask ourselves
to shoot ourselves in the foot by continuing the practice of Informational RFC
publication?
Because their value is much higher than the harm caused by a few
insufficiently-clued readers.
When we had this discussion ten years ago, there were many stories of marketing
departments flogging Informational and Experimental RFCs as "standards". When
we had it five years ago, there were fewer. These days, we rarely hear it, and
essentially never from major companies. Our outreach efforts have mostly worked!
We have seen *huge* interoperability benefits in the past few years from
publishing Informational RFCs that would never get IETF consensus, at least in
the Security Area (and I suspect in other areas as well). Let's not throw that
away because the occasional ideologue wants to latch on to an Informational or
Experimental RFC as a reason to support his position.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf