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Re: The Evils of Informational RFC's

2010-09-10 07:25:39
I do think informational RFCs (both IETF and non-IETF) are valuable.

I would suggest though that their value is mostly NOT about ease of access, archival, those great ASCII graphics, or any other practical matter. The value is in our assessment of them being worthy of being published as RFCs. (Our = the IETF community, IESG and other reviews, RFC Editor board decisions, etc) I generally treat all information as suspect, even full standard RFCs (horror!) but I still think that across a number of different information sources even a vendor's protocol spec as an independent submission is pretty reliable.

So yes, lets keep on publishing informational, experimental, and individual and independent submission RFCs. They are not the primary source of technical information in Internet technology, but for me at least they do provide a lot of value.

Sam: about the binding Informational documents. I also do recognize that we sometimes make choices, say, about architectures or requirements and that we should stick with those decisions in future work. However, I would like to make two comments on this. First, many decisions of this sort are soft rather than hard. As an example, we often compromise on a requirement in order to reach a feasible solution. I'm not sure we want to bind ourselves to decisions of this type in any formal sense. Second, I think it is easier to think of the bindingness in terms of the history of the document and the practical situation than as a binary attribute of the document class.

Jari

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