On Sun, 2013-05-05, John C Klensin wrote:
Finally, there are a few things that we used to do, that were
helpful, and that were abandoned due to industry evolution and
changes in priorities. The original idea of a Proposed Standard
as a fairly rough specification that would be used for study and
evaluation on the basis of implementation experience, not a spec
from which products were built, is one that has been mentioned
(although not quite in that way).
FWIW, this leads me to the thought that the IETF may have a
terminology problem. The word "standard" is used too soon in the
maturity levels of RFCs.
I think that our skills are primarily in producing "protocols"
rather than "standards". Perhaps it would have been better if the
names of the maturity levels were something like:
Proposed Protocol
Test Version 1 Protocol
Test Version 2 protocol
.
.
.
Standard Protocol
Only using the word "standard" when it was determined to be
stable and recommended for wide usage.
Anyway, my 2 cents.
--
Bill McQuillan <McQuilWP(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com>