--On Monday, May 06, 2013 00:26 -0700 Bill McQuillan
<McQuilWP(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com> wrote:
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.
Not the first time this has been proposed. Or even only the
fourth or fifth. That doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea,
just one the community has not been willing to adopt.
john