On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 12:17:46AM +0300, Yoav Nir wrote:
The "Experimental" designation typically denotes a specification that
is part of some research or development effort.
However, I do not believe that this is still typical. Authors come up with
ideas that they think are useful. If when the documents are ready for
publication it is still not clear whether there are enough implementers
convinced by the use case (some definition of running code), they are
encouraged to publish them as experimental rather than proposed standard.
Yes, and surely what we want is that we continue to mislabel as many
RFCs as possible in this way. We want to make our own contribution to
the gradual reduction of all words to mean everything else, so that we
can all communicate exclusively by mumbling, "Whatever." Now that the
AP Stylebook has given up on "hopefully" and Oxford is playing with
the comma, anything goes.
Neither of these can really be called an "experiment" except in the
sense of "let's see if the Internet needs this specification".
Yes, and that's a stupid meaning of the term in this case, because
quite frankly all the rest of the RFCs are also experiments in this
sense (and many of them have delivered the clarion answer, "Don't need
it at all!" When was the last time you used BEEP?)
I don't know what I think about the proposal overall, but I will say
that one thing definitely in its favour is that it would discourage
those who think that "Experimental" is the Standards Track Consolation
Prize Track. I'd be wholeheartedly in its favour, except that the old
"2 year review" standards track process didn't work, so we ditched
it. I don't see how recycling the approach with Experimental
documents is any more likely to succeed.
Best,
A
--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs(_at_)anvilwalrusden(_dot_)com