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Re: Discuss criteria for documents that advance on the standards track

2011-08-31 06:36:57
On Aug 31, 2011, at 2:31 AM, John C Klensin wrote:

--On Tuesday, August 30, 2011 14:51 -0700 Fred Baker
<fred(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:

What's also not fair game is to "raise the bar" - to expect
the document at DS to meet more stringent criteria than it
was required to meet at the time of PS approval.

Hmmm, the "demonstrated interoperability" requirement of DS/IS
is in fact a raising of the bar,and one that has served us
well. We don't (although IMHO we should) require even an
implementation to go to PS. 

I know it is controversial, but there is at least one other area
in which we should be raising the bar for DS/IS by dropping the
bar for Proposed.  If we really want to get PS specs out quickly
while the percentage of people who easily write very high
quality technical English in the IETF continues to go down, we
need to stop the behavior of various IESG members simulating
technical editors or translators to "fix" PS text (or insisting
that the author or WG do so, which, IMO, is less bad but still
often a problem).  Doing that will get documents out faster,
perhaps even a lot faster in some cases, but will inevitably
result in PS documents that need significant editorial work
before being approved at DS.  

Given that people commonly implement and deploy Proposed Standards in products, 
sometimes even prior to their approval as Proposed Standards, I think this is a 
very bad idea.  I think it's likely to create interoperability problems between 
PS and DS versions of products, and sometimes between implementations of the 
same PS version.  For better or worse, the widespread desire to implement at PS 
(recommendations in 2026 notwithstanding) pretty much forces IETF to try to 
produce high quality prose at PS.

I agree that IESG should not generally be acting as technical editors, so maybe 
IETF needs to find some way to provide technical editors who are proficient in 
technical English before documents are reviewed by IESG.  Documents written by 
native English speakers would also benefit.   Maybe the GEN-ART review could be 
expanded, or maybe the RFC Editor could assume some role here (awkward though 
that might be at first).

Keith



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