On 20/07/2016 02:13, Miles Fidelman wrote:
On 7/19/16 7:54 AM, Yaron Sheffer wrote:
Once an RFC is published, there is essentially no way for readers to provide
feedback: what works, what are the implementation
pitfalls, how does the document relate to other technologies or even to
other RFCs.
We IETF insiders usually know what is the relevant working group, and can
take our feedback there. Non-insiders though don't
have any contact point, and so will most likely keep their feedback to
themselves. These non-IETFers are the target audience
of our documents! Unfortunately, our so-called "Requests for Comments" are
anything but an invitation to submit comments.
There is a number of tools now that allow "web annotations" (i.e., comments)
on various published documents. I submitted a
draft [1] recently that proposes to enable annotations on the "tools"
version of our RFCs. Technically, this is a trivial
change. From a process point of view it is more complicated and merits
discussion on this list. Sec. 6 of the draft allows you
to see for yourself what such annotations would look like.
Maybe a silly observation, but we might look at the HTML "Living Standard"
(https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/) - as
maintained by WHATWG. Their process seems to have the benefit of working
reasonably well over time.
If that is your impression, I have to wonder whether you've ever tried to
"dialogue" with whatwg on a matter that challenges their received wisdom.
I don't think that is a good model for the IETF to follow.
Brian